The Colonial Present: Afghanistan, Palestine, Iraq

'!i "This is a great book. An impassioned plea by one of the world's most eminent ; :, ographers to displace the distorted imaginative geographies that have so

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.

:;'corrupted our representations of the Islamic world with a geographical

�;,' imagination that enlarges and enhances our understandings. The long historical

,twisted detail in order to comprehend the fractures underpinning contemporary

':political impasses in Palestine, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The Colonial Present is a " 'must read' for all those concerned for peace and justice in our time." David Harvey, author

the.

olonlal

'geography of the colonial encounter in the Middle East is here laid bare in all its

oJThe New Imperialism

Present

"Brilliantly condenses the multiple geographies of colonialism ... so that their "contemporary entanglements with the flexings of modern imperial power

crackle with intensity. Using September 11, 2001 as a political fulcrum, Gregory

: traces the searing effects of fluid but durable cartographies of violence in the intersecting wars in Mghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq." Cindi Katz, Graduate Centre, Ci{y Universi{y oJNew lVrk

"po effully ind persuasively argued. Passionately written. A daring, brilliant

VIY �iS ... .',Quitesiinply the most significant book written by a geographer in

anal

some time." '��

Allan Pred, Universi{y oj California, Berkeley

In this po.werful and passionate critique of the "war on terror" in Mghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq, Derek Gr�ory traces the long history of British and American involvements in the Middle East. He argues that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon on September II

activated a series of political and cultural responses that mapped a profoundly colonial perimeter of power.

Th; Colonial Present traces the connections between political, military, and economic

power - the 'grand strategies of geopolitics - and the spatial stories told by the lives of ordinary people. It also shows the intimate connections between events in Mghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq. Packed with ,empirical detail, and shot through with arresting arguments,

The Colonial Present is

indispensable reading for anyone seeking to understand a world riven by a war on terror that is

also a war ifterror.

Derek Gregory is Distinguished University Scholar and Professor of Geography at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver. "' . -, , ', "

. ".
Civilian casualties Dec.,

Population Density (per square mile)

. 200 - 550

1:.:';1 111 . .

' 5 - 99 ' 00- ' 99 200 - 399 400 - 1,100

Civilian casualties in Afghanistan (after Marc Herold and

Steve Cater)

the friends and families pummeled by inconsolable loss, because no sup­ posedly "sacred mission" - jihad or crusade - can provide a warrant for this indiscriminate killing. In all of these ways, then, the imaginative geographies of a colonial past reasserted themselves in the colonial present. What Gilroy describes� appropriately, as at once "old, modern notions of racial difference" were activated within a differential calculus according to which "some human bodies are more easily and appropriately humiliated, imprisoned, shack­ led, starved and destroyed than others. " He continues: These fine ethnic distinctions effectively revive a colonial economy in which infrahumanity, measured against the benchmark of healthier imperial standards, diminishes human rights and can defer human recognition. The native, the enemy, the prisoner and all the other shadowy "third things" lodged between animal and human can only be held accountable under special emergency rules and fierce martial laws. Their lowly status underscores the fact that

73

"Civilization" and "Barbarism "

"Civilization " and "Barbarism "

they cannot be reciprocally endowed with the same vital humanity enjoyed by their well-heeled captors, conquerors, judges, executioners and other racial betters.68

warlords have grown bolder every day, settling old scores, extending their own networks of patronage, building their own political constituencies, and running end-games around an administration in Kabul that still struggles to extend its patchwork authority beyond the capital. Cluster bombs buried beneath the ground continue to explode, killing and maiming innocent civil­ ians.71 Every month, in what has become one of the most heavily mined countries in the world, between 1 50 and 300 people are killed by land­ mines. Countless more become sick or die from polluted water, disease, or malnutrition. Six million people are at risk from hunger and starva­ tion. The difficulties of rebuilding this broken land are enormous, and yet the promised international aid is desperately slow to arrive. "This is what we returned to! " one anguished - and angry - young man told journalist Polly Toynbee in November 2002.

72

The sovereign powers and delegations that decreed that the lives and deaths of all these people were of no account - who claimed to wage a war of "civilization" against " barbarism" within the spaces of their own excep­ tion - must surely be called to account and made to reflect on the mean­ ings of the wretched colonial antinomies through which they preach vengeance and retribution.

Deconstruction

The numbers of victims continue to grow as I write. While US bombing raids continue and on the ground US troops still seek out al-Qaeda and Taliban fighters - with decidedly mixed results - there have been repeated incidents in which civilians have become targets of their military opera­ tions. Robert Fisk documented a particularly shocking case in which the southern village of Hajibirgit was attacked by US Special Forces in the middle of the night. More than one hundred families were forced out of their homes by stun grenades, the women's hands were bound and their burqas removed, and one child, fleeing in terror, stumbled into the village well and drowned. The village elder was shot dead, and 55 other men were seized, handcuffed, and blindfolded, and flown by helicopter to Kandahar. There they were tied and shackled and had thick sacks placed over their heads; they were stripped naked, had their beards shaved, and were inter­ rogated. Finally they were "issued with bright-yellow clothes and taken to a series of wire cages laid out over the sand of the airbase - a minia­ ture version of Guantanamo Bay - where they were given bread, biscuits, rice, beans and bottled water." The villagers were held in the cages for five days before they were released and flown home accompanied by apolo­ gies. When they arrived they found that in their absence Hajibirgit had been pillaged by a local warlord, and that most of the inhabitants had fled into the hills.69 Neither the violence of the initial assault nor the lawlessness that fol­ lowed is exceptional. US Special Forces have reportedly stormed through other villages "as if bin Laden was in every house. ,,70 In July 2002 an Islamic Transitional Authority replaced the interim administration, but the

We were promised by the world that if we fought the Russians for you, you would look after us. But you didn't. Then we fought the Taliban and al-Qaeda, and now look at us, here on this hillside in the mud, the winter coming and our children will die of cold. Where is your help now?72

Six months later one shocked journalist reported: "Afghanistan is no longer a country at all. ,,73 Without sustained reconstruction of the Afghan economy, and without a concerted effort to establish the institutions of a genuinely civil society, the same matrix that supported the growth of al-Qaeda will reassert itself. As one minister in the transitional administration warned, You have a population of professional warriors who are poor and will do anything for money. These people will find their way back into global terrorism. If the West turns its back on Afghanistan it will be writing its own suicide note. How many 1 1 Septembers do you want to happen?74

But the White House preferred what Michael Ignatieff calls "nation­ building lite," and American priorities remain fastened on military objectives. "We're not here because of the drought and the famine and the condition of women," the head of programs for the United States Agency for International Development in Afghanistan admitted. "We're here because of 9/1 1 . ,,75 The international aid agencies and NGOs are trou­ bled by the "gray area" that they say the United States has sought to estab­ lish between military operations and humanitarian aid - bombs and food

74

"Civilization " and "Barbarism "

parcels all over again - and they are understandably worried by the dan­ ger to their own staff should they be mistaken for US military personneJ.76 The agencies have started to make inroads here and there, but the human­ itarian situation remains critical and refugees (many of whom have been forcibly returned to Afghanistan) are subjected to ferocious deprivation. In the summer of 2002 Fisk found 60,000 of them "rot[ting] along their frontier with Pakistan"; but "Pakistan no longer wants this riff-raff of poor and destitute on its squeaky clean border" and so "a second circle of hell" had been created for them 40 miles west of Kandahar, "a grey, hot desert, reached through minefields and shot through with blow-torch winds and black stones. ,,77 During the winter of 2002/3 an ad hoc alliance emerged between the renegade mujaheddin of Gulbuddin Hekmatyar's Hizb-i-Islami militia, groups of al-Qaeda stragglers, and remaining Taliban fighters, and these factions achieved a considerable degree of operational cohesion. In the border towns and refugee camps of north-west Pakistan, one journalist reported, "the talk is of war and of the return of the Taliban to Afghanis­ tan." When the militias descend on the refugee camps in Quetta, Peshawar, and Karachi to recruit new members they point to the violence and destruction of continuing US military operations and the broken promises of reconstruction and development. Politically, they display a new con­ fidence in calling for a " holy war" against the occupying "crusaders" and their "puppet regime," and militarily their guerrilla operations against US forces have intensified along the border with Pakistan.78 By the spring of 2003 US forces had little to show for their continuing operations. "Nearly every day," the New York Times reported, "there are killings, explosions, shootings, and targeted attacks on foreign aid workers." When troops turn villages upside down in their search for weapons caches or make repeated arrests, ordinary Afghans are markedly unimpressed: many are left humil­ iated and angry at the disruption of their lives. The people from Lejay were so furious at the conduct of US Special Forces who spent ten days searching through their village, that they wrote an open letter to the United Nations mission in Afghanistan. "They did not find Mullah Omar, they did not find Osama bin Laden, and they did not find any Taliban," the petition reads. But "they arrested old men, drivers, and shopkeepers, and they injured women and children." This is all troubling enough. But the United States has also allowed the warlords that it enlisted in its war against the Taliban to assume control of much of the country outside Kabul, and even Hamid Karzai's brother,

"Civilization " and "Barbarism"

75

Ahmed Wali Karzai, has been moved to say that it is like "seeing the same movie twice and no one is trying to fix the problem. What was promised to Afghans with the collapse of the Taliban was a new life of hope and change. But what was delivered? Nothing. Everyone is back in business. ,,79 The warlords were incorporated into the post-war government - where many of them have ministerial positions - but they retained their own fiefdoms. "While each expediently mouths allegiance to President Hamid Karzai in Kabul, they still maintain their own militaries and collect their own revenues. " They also play a leading role in redistributing reconstruc­ tion assistance, which further consolidates their regional powers.80 The links between the interim government and the warlords are thus at once close and strained - Afghanistan is, once again, a forcefield of c�ntend­ ing powers - and this intimate tension extends beyond struggles over political authority, financial resources, and military muscle. The civilian population continues to suffer extraordinary depredations: armed rob­ beries, extortion, and kidnappings; arbitrary arrest and beatings; the rape of women, girls, and boys: all have become commonplace. Human Rights Watch reports that both the warlords and officials in the interim govern­ ment are implicated in these abuses: "These violations have been carried out by people who would not have come to power without the interven­ tion and support of the international community. ,,8 1 As America's imaginative geographies of "friend" and "enemy" spin like the tumblers on a slot machine, therefore, it is not surprising that so many Afghanis become cynical. "I have a problem with your definition of 'enemy' and 'friend,' " one mujaheddin leader from the 1 980s told an American agent in Jalalabad: In the 1980s, when you first came to Afghanistan, you also introduced Osama

:··t ��c' �:-;

[bin Laden] to me, lsaying he was a great man and would be very useful to me. I always mistrusted foreign fighters in my country. I was told from all sides to accept Osama and his other lunatic friends. Then your best friends were also the likes of Hekmatyar, Rabbani and others. If you remember I told you they were very dangerous people. Your then best friends are now your worst enemies, and you are asking me to do the impossible, keep fol� , . . lowing your chain of thought.82

The expedient rotations of the imaginative geographies set in motion by the Bush administration thus not only have performative force: they also have extraordinarily destructive power.

Barbed Boundaries

5

Barbed Boundaries

All the birds that followed my palm To the door of the distant airport All the wheatfields All the prisons All the white tombstones All the barbed boundaries All the waving handkerchiefs All the eyes were with me But they dropped them from my passport. Mahmoud Darwish, Passport

America 's Israel

HROUGH T

the events of September 1 1 the arc that I have been tracing between America and Afghanistan intersected with a second terrify­ ing trajectory that speared Israel and the occupied territories of Palestine. This second trajectory reaches back far beyond the formation of the state of Israel to the European conquest of North America itself, which in many of the eastern colonies was inflected by a Judaeo-Christian imaginary within which the continent appeared as the new "Promised Land" whose settle­ ment was to be illuminated by a beacon on a hill, the foundation of a "New Jerusalem." In 1 850 Hermann Melville famously described Americans as

77

"the peculiar, chosen people - the Israel of our time," and these affilia­ tions were strengthened by American travelers who journeyed to Palestine in ever-increasing numbers after the Civil War and whose writings, paint­ ings, and photographs enabled a domestic audience to reaffirm a vicarious identification with the region. Indeed, as John Davis has shown, many of those travelers claimed to understand the landscape so much better than those who lived there that the Holy Land became, imaginatively and ideologically, "American." While American (like European) travelers registered the presence of Arabs, these remained marginal figures: it was the landscape itself that was central to their collective gaze.! From the closing decades of the nineteenth century this marginalization - eventually studied erasure - of the Arab population assumed a starkly physical form as American Jews joined those from other lands to establish the first mod­ ern Jewish settlements in Palestine.2 There were, of course, reverse ties too. In the middle decades of the nineteenth century hundreds of thousands of German Jews crossed the Atlantic to America, and from the 1 880s on into the early twentieth century millions of Polish and Russian Jews fled the pogroms and restrictions imposed on them in the Pale of Settlement for sanctuary in the United States. Together these movements laid the foun­ dations of Zionism's political constituency within the United States. These cultural connections were subsequently reinforced by a series of geopolitical filiations. Following the formation of the state of Israel in 1948, Perry Anderson claims that Zionism "relied on a carapace of American power.,, 3 But American interest in Israel was fitful, negotiating an awkward passage between its dependence on Middle East oil and its determination to counter Soviet influence during the Cold War. Three moments were of decisive importance. First, the victory of Israel in what it called the Six Day War in 1 967 clearly impressed an America whose forces were not only being defeated but also humiliated in Vietnam. President Lyndon B. Johnson took what has been described as "vicarious pleasure" from Israel's ability "to thwart an Arab war of national liberation not unlike the one the United States faced in Vietnam." Egypt's President Nasser had embraced the Viet Cong struggle and encouraged the Palestinians to launch their own war for national liberation; but Johnson'S reaction was about more than unaffected pleasure and Israel was not a passive partner in the consummation of this "special relationship. " With their victory in 1 967, "the Israelis positioned themselves to become a strategic asset [against the spread of communism] at precisely the moment when the debacle in Southeast Asia was tempting the United States to limit its

79

Barbed Boundaries

Barbed Boundaries

involvement in the Middle East. " After the 1967 war France suspended arms shipments to Israel, and Egypt and Syria began to rebuild their armies through a closer relationship with the USSR, and so the Israeli govern­ ment, in concert with major American Zionist organizations, worked to ensure that the United States would offer Israel unconditional support.4 ' It was therefore increasingly seen as desirable for America to act not only like Israel but also with Israel: so much so, indeed, that throughout the 1 970s Israel's military audacity attracted "increased US investment in an image of a militarized Israel that represented revitalized masculinity and restored national pride.,,5 The violent response of the Palestine Liberation Organization to Israel's occupation of Gaza and the West Bank encouraged further US aid and assistance, but the PLO was a secular organization and it was not until the American hostage crisis in Iran between 1 979 and 1981 - the second moment - that a conjunction between "Islam" and "terrorism" was estab­ lished within American public culture through which many Americans and Israelis were able to find a common language and a common cause. In fact, on the day that the hostages were released, President Ronald Reagan announced that terrorism would replace human rights as America's pri­ mary foreign policy concern. 6 The alliance between America and Israel has varied in its intensity, but Israel has been the largest cumulative recipient of US aid since the Second World War - between 1949 and 2001 it received between $90 and $100 billion - and aid to Israel now accounts for around 30 percent of the total US foreign aid budget.7 The third decisive punctuation point in this special relationship was September 1 1, but, as I must now show, to understand its present signifi­ .cance it is necessary to return to the colonial past.

of the crumbling Ottoman Empire, and by the final years of the nineteenth century these holdings were seen, under the sign of Zionism, as small stepping-stones toward the reclamation of the biblical Land of -Israel (Eretz Israel). In Der Judenstaat, a pamphlet published in 1 896, Theodor Herzl argued that it was only through the birth of their own nation-state that Jews would emerge into the world of modernity. Until then, they would live at best provisionally, so to speak, enduring a double exile from their land and from their destiny. Their "return" - in Hebrew, aliyah (ascent) - to the Land of Israel would thus signify their re-entry into history (or, rather, History). The Zionists knew very well that Arabs lived on the land; they knew, too, that they would not give it up willingly. But - in another quintessentially colonial gesture - the indigenous population was reduced to the mute object of history, people who merely have things done to them, and never recognized as one of its active subjects. According to Zionism, it was given to the Jews alone to reclaim "the wilderness," to make the desert bloom so that the land once again flowed with milk and honey to make the very earth come alive again. As historian Gabriel Piterberg puts it, it was as though "the land, too, was condemned to an exile so long as there was no Jewish sovereignty over it: it lacked any meaningful ,, or authentic history, awaiting redemption with the return of the Jews. 9 In the following decades thousands more Jewish immigrants arrived to claim a place in Palestine. Arab farmers and laborers saw this as a creep­ ing dispossession, and the new settlers were met with animosity and even­ tually resistance. Most of their early settlements were built along the coastal plains and in the northern valleys, and they found it much more difficult to secure toeholds in the mountainous heartland of Palestine. In the years that followed, the immigrants formed armed militias so that their coloniza­ tion of the land could proceed behind what Ze'ev Jabotinksy called "an iron wall" that the Arabs would be powerless to breach. These beginnings were crucial, because they forged a triple imperative that has shaped Zionist ideology ever since. Settlement, security, and sovereignty were fused in an essential union that has continued to function as something far deeper than any political and military objective, something much closer to an existential imperative.10 Herzl had located the Zionist project within the larger framework of European colonialism and imperialism. A Jewish state in Palestine would form "part of a rampart for Europe against Asia," he wrote, "an outpost of civilization as opposed to barbarism. " This bellicose and brutalizing image would be repeated throughout the next century and beyond. During

78

Diaspora, Dispossession, a nd Disaster

The Zionist dream of uniting the diaspora in a Jewish state was by its very nature a colonial project.8 In a gesture that had been repeated time and time again since the European conquest of the New World, the discourse of modern Zionism constructed Palestine as a space empty of its native Arab population. A series of campaigns - at once political and military, economic and cultural - was waged to establish this imaginary as brute "facts on the ground." Beginning in 1 878 European Jews had already started to purchase a patchwork of agricultural land in Palestine, then still part

80

the First World War - hardly a vindication of European "civilization" British foreign policy toward Palestine was Janus-faced. In 1 91 5-16 Britain persuaded Husayn ibn 'Ali, the grand sheriff of Mecca and head of the Hashemite family, to lead the Arabs in an uprising against the increas­ ingly secular regime of the Ottoman Empire which had aligned itself with Germany. His reward was to be the foundation of a single, unified and independent state in the Arab provinces of the defeated empire. In 1 9 1 7 the British government also affirmed, through the Balfour Declaration, that it viewed with favor "the establishment in Palestine of a national home for the Jewish people." It promised to use its " best endeavours to facili­ tate the achievement of this object," but wanted it clearly understood "that nothing shall be done which may prejudice the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities in Palestine." It is hard to imagine how these vicious circles, intersecting in Palestine but drawn by 'the warped power-geometries of European imperialism, could ever have been squared. At the end of the war, following the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, Britain occupied Palestine and in 1 920 received a Mandate from the League of Nations to administer the territory. The mandate system entrusted to "advanced nations" the "tutelage" of those peoples who were "not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world." The Mandate for Palestine showed little regard for its indigenous inhabitants even by the colonialist tenor of this framing legislation and its enfeeblement of subaltern populations. Instead, the Mandate repeated the terms of the Balfour Declaration. A "Jewish national home" would be established in Palestine, and the Mandatory authority was required to "facilitate Jewish immigration" and encourage its "close settlement on the land. "ll In 1921 Britain detached "Transjordan" in order to establish a Hashemite state east of the River Jordan; after the ratifica­ tion of the British Mandate in the following year, Jewish settlement west of the Jordan accelerated (figure 5.1). Although it was buttressed by British military and police forces, the situation in Mandatory Palestine was fraught and unstable. Confrontations between Jews and Arabs became increasingly violent, and when the so-called "Arab Revolt" broke out in 1 936 the British government established a Royal Commission under Lord Peel to inquire into the circumstances of the unrest. When they visited Palestine, Chaim Weizmann, president of the World Zionist Organiza­ tion, told the commissioners that "the revolt" was merely "the old war of the desert against civilization": " On one side, the forces of destruction, the forces of the desert have arisen and on the other side stand firm the , ,

81

Barbed Boundaries

Barbed Boundaries

SYRIA

IRAQ

SAUDI ARABIA

--

British Mandate for PaJestine, 1 92o

Figure 5.1 The British Mandate for Palestine (1920) and Mandatory Palestine ( 1921 ) (after H. M. Sacher/Palestinian Society for the Study of International Affairs)

forces of civilization and building." The commissioners were impressed by Weizmann's testimony. They declared that "the Jewish National Home is no longer an experiment," and drew a "striking" contrast between "the modern democratic and primarily European character of the National Home and that of the Arab world around it." The representation of Jewish colonization as modernization was a tenacious stratagem, and many politicians used it, then and since, to legitimize the dispossession of the Palestinians. There was no injustice in removing Arabs from their land, Churchill told the Peel Commission: "The injustice is when those who live in the country leave it to be desert for thousands of years." Colonial modernity was seen by its advocates as the life-blood of a renewed Palestine, and Judaicization was to be the means of its transfusion. The commissioners used a similar pathological metaphor to conclude that the conflict between Jews and Arabs was irrepressible within the body of a single state. Palestine was "diseased," they wrote, and a "surgical opera­ tion" was required: they recommended partitionY

82

Barbed Boundaries

According to the Commission's proposals, the Jews would receive 20 percent of Mandatory Palestine (figure 5.2). Even before the Commission completed its deliberations, however, Jewish settlers were busily working to extend the visible perimeter of their territorial claims by building "tower and stockade" settlements. These fulfilled the existential imperative of Zionism with a raw power. Here is one witness: By late afternoon, a new Jewish village had sprung up. Bungalows had been erected, barricades run up around the boundaries, and the wooden watch­ tower, complete with lamp and dynamo, put in position. When night fell the lamp was switched on amid dead silence. It threw a powerful beam across the surrounding waste. Its symbolism was apparent to all. . . . It was the light of a new life and a new era. An area from which civilization had departed 2,000 years before was being reclaimed. 13

The performance of this imaginative geography, with its colonial couplets of darkness and light, waste and civilization, proved to be a model for subsequent conquest and settlement. At the time, the Jewish Agency had serious reservations about the Peel Commission's proposals, and its chief negotiator with the Mandatory Authority, Moshe Sharratt, objected that "the proposed Jewish state territory would not be contiguous; its bound­ aries would be twisted and broken" and "the frontier line would separate villages from their fields." Although the Jewish Agency accepted the pro­ posals as a basis for negotiation, therefore, its leaders regarded the recom­ mendations as interim measures that would eventually deliver the whole country to the Jews. Many of them fastened on the Commission's pro­ posals for the transfer of the Arab population out of its new state. "If the settlement is to be clean and final," the commissioners wrote, then 225,000 Arabs living in the area to be allocated to the Jewish state would eventually have to be to be "re-settled." The concept of transfer was central to the Zionist vision of the Land of Israel as a state with both territorial and cultural integrity.14 But some militant Zionist factions notably the Irgun, led by Menachem Begin - rejected any such temporiz­ ing and denounced the proposals outright. "The partition of Palestine is illegal," Begin fumed, and "Eretz Israel will be restored to the people of Israel. All of it. And for ever." The Arab Higher Committee, which represented the Palestinian Arabs, viewed partition as illegal too but for diametrically opposite reasons, and dismissed the plan as "absurd, impracticable and unjust. " 1 5

.. Jewish state

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20 k1lomtlm

Figure 5.2 The Peel Commission's plan for the partition of Palestine, 1937

84

Barbed Boundaries

There seemed no way out of the impasse, and the prospect of partition dimmed still further with the approach of the Second World War. As the horrors of the Shoah started to become known, the Zionist case for a per­ manent sanctuary in Palestine achieved a new and desperate momentum. But this was not sufficient to produce a political resolution, and with ter­ rorist attacks and riots against its Mandate increasing in severity, Britain devolved the Palestine question to the fledgling United Nations. A Special Committee was appointed, and following its report, in the autumn of 1947, a divided General Assembly passed Resolution 1 8 1 in favor of the partition of Palestine. At that time the United Nations had only 56 member states: 33 of them supported the recommendation (including the USA; the USSR; most European member states; and Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and South Africa, all of them British dominions); 13 voted against (Afghanistan, Cuba, Egypt, Greece, India, Iran, Iraq, Lebanon, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Syria, Turkey, and Yemen); and 10 abstained (including the UK). A two-thirds majority was required to implement partition, and the Zionist lobby with US President Harry S. Truman on one side and the Arab states on the other worked hard to secure votes: in the end, the reso­ lution narrowly achieved the necessary majority. There was thus nothing inevitable, still less "natural," about the partition of Palestine; it was framed by geopolitical alignments in which the USA, Europe, and the USSR exer­ cised considerable power and influence, and it was always contentious. The Jews, with 35 percent of the population, were granted 56 percent of the territory of Mandatory Palestine, and the city of Jerusalem, in the light of its transnational religious significance, was to be placed under a "special international regime" (figure 5.3 }. 1 6 Almost immediately, civil war broke out. Guerrilla attacks were launched by Arabs and by Jews. Both sides blockaded roads, planted bombs, and murdered unarmed civilians. Hostilities intensified in early April when Begin's Irgun militia entered the Arab village of Deir Yassin and massacred 250 civilians.1 7 Haganah, the main Jewish militia, began to seize Arab cities and destroy Arab villagesY In Tel Aviv on May 14, 1 948 a defiant David Ben-Gurion proclaimed the foundation of the state of Israel. The very next day the armies of Egypt, Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Iraq invaded. By the time the conflict ended in 1 949 some 750,000 Palestinians had been displaced, more than half the Arab population. Most of them fled as a direct result of Israeli military action, much of it before the Arab armies intervened; there were massacres of Palestinian villages, forced expulsions, and wholesale intimidation of the civilian population.

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Jewish state Arab state Corpus separatum

Medilerra n e a n Sea

R 0 A N

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c Y P T

20mil�

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Figure 5.3 The United Nations' plan for the partition of Palestine, 1947

86

Barbed Boundaries

Many people sought refuge in Gaza and the West Bank, while others fled to Transjordan, Syria, Lebanon, and Egypt. Wherever the refugees found themselves, however, they found no sign of any Palestinian state. After an armistice had been concluded with Egypt and Jordan, establishing a series of so-called " Green Lines," the coastal plain around Gaza was adminis­ tered by Egypt, and East Jerusalem and the West Bank were administered by Jordan.19 To the Palestinians this was a compound catastrophe of destruction, dis� possession and dispersal - what they called al-Nakba ( "the disaster") , which has proved to be an ever-present horizon of meaning within which, in Mahmoud Darwish's haunting phrase, the Palestinian people have been cast into "redundant shadows exiled from space and time. " "The Nakba," Darwish wrote over 50 years later, "is an extended present that , promises to continue in the future. , 2o To the Israelis, however, all this was the sweet fruit of what they called their "War of Independence. " And yet, as Joseph Massad asks, "from whom were the Zionists declaring their inde­ pendence? " This is a sharp question: the British had withdrawn from the Mandate before the war broke out, and Israel continued to depend on im­ perial sponsorship after it ended. Massad argues that the invocation of "independence" was an attempt to rehabilitate the intrinsically colonial project of Zionism by establishing Israel as a postcolonial state. And yet this new state had emerged not only flushed with victory but with far more land - other people's land - than had been granted to it by either the Peel Commission or the United Nations. Israel now held not 20 percent or 56 percent but 78 percent of the territory that had been Mandatory Palestine (figure 5.4), including 95 percent of the arable land that had been classi­ fied by the Mandatory authority as "good. ,, 21 But within those engorged boundaries the land that was legally owned by Jewish property-holders and organizations, together with land that had been held by the Mandatory Authority and over which Israel now assumed ownership, accounted for only 13.5 percent of the total. As soon as the war was over, therefore, Israel initiated a massive transfer of land ownership and sought to erase the Arab presence from the landscape in order to establish not only its sovereignty but also its patrimony. This took place in legal, statistical, and cultural registers. The Israeli legal system consistently used procedural and evidential rules to limit the possibility of Arab residents retaining their land: "It created a legal geography of power," Alexandre Kedar concludes, "that contributed to the disposses­ sion of Arab landholders while simultaneously masking and legitimating

l1li Proposed Jewish state

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Proposed Arab state

� Territories seized by Israel, 1 948·9

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Figure 5.4 Palestinian territories seized by Israel, 1948-9 (after PASSIA)

the reallocation of that land to the Jewish population."22 Said argues that

Occupation, Coercion, and Colonization

the creation of a Jewish state had to posit non-Jews as "radically other, fundamentally and constitutively different," and so Israel set about what Palestinian geographer Ghazi Falah describes as a process of almost ritually violent "cleansing" or "purification" through which the country was to be reenvisioned as a blank slate across which Jewish signatures could be written at will. To create such " facts on the ground" required immense physical erasures - evictions, displacements, seizures, and demolitions and, marching in lockstep with them, the production of a greatly extended grid of Jewish settlement. Between 1 948 and 1950 alone Israel destroyed over 400 Palestinian villages and built 1 60 Jewish settlements on land that had been confiscated from its former occupants.23 This physical elabora­ tion of Israeli power was underwritten by the fabrication of an imagina­ tive geography that was designed to make it virtually impossible for Palestinian refugees to return. This too was about the creation of " facts on the ground. " Those who had left their homes but remained in Israel found that the new census designated them as "present absentees," a for­ mula which denied them the right to return to their towns and villages and repossess their property, which was then appropriated by the state.

On June 5, 1967 Israel launched pre-emptive strikes against Egypt and Syria, and by the end of the morning - fatefully for the Palestinians - Jordan also entered the war. Six days later Israel had seized the Sinai peninsula and Gaza from Egypt, and the Golan Heights from Syria. Still more significantly, Jordan had been displaced from the West Bank, so that Israel now effectively controlled 1 00 percent of the area of Mandatory Palestine. The victory was soon invested with religious, even messianic, importance. Just as the world was supposedly made after the six days of Creation, so Eretz Israel was made whole after what came to be called the "Six Day War. " By the end of June hundreds of Arab families had been summarily evicted from East Jerusalem, which was annexed by Israel, and in September the Israeli government endorsed the first Israeli "settlement" on the West Bank and expropriated all state-owned land there. The transfer of any part of a civilian population into territory occupied by a foreign power is expressly forbidden under Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention

Those who had fled to other countries faced an Israeli propaganda

relative to the Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War (1949), and

campaign designed to make it impossible for them even to contemplate

in November 1967 the UN Security Council passed Resolution 242 that

returning. Not only had their property been seized, but they were to be made to give up their collective memory too. Arabic place-names were replaced with Hebrew or biblical ones, and images of the Israeli trans­ formation of the land - its massive scale and its brute physicality - were disseminated to persuade the refugees that there was nothing recognizable left for them to return to. Thus was Israeli territorialization firmly yoked to Palestinian de-territorialization. The Zionist dream of Eretz Israel that had been sustained across the diaspora had finally been turned into a real­

emphatically reminded Israel of "the inadmissibility of the acquisition of

territory by force," required it to withdraw "from territories occupied

in the recent conflict," and affirmed the right of every state "to live in peace with secure and recognized boundaries free from threats or acts of force. " The English text did not refer to "all the territories" or even "the territories," which enabled successive Israeli administrations and their apologists to exploit what they chose to regard as an ambiguous space for interpretative wrangling. Against this, however, lawyer John McHugo

ity, but Palestine was de-realized and presented to its people as nothing

has presented a compelling counter-argument. He makes three submissions.

more than a chimera, as what Piterberg calls " an unreturnable and irrec­ ollective country. ,, 24 The project failed, of course. The Palestinian people

First, the resolution is framed by a preamble that expressly notes "the in­ admissibility of the acquisition of territory by force" which is plainly a

had most of their land taken from them, but in a host of ways - from

general not a selective principle. As McHugo notes, this has implications

poetry to politics25 - they have retained their memories of the Palestinian

for the territories seized by Israel in 1 948 as well as those occupied in 1967. His second submission rests on a commonsense analogy: no reasonable

past and, as I propose to show, their hopes for a Palestinian future. These retentions and elaborations are profoundly spatialized, not only in the sense of the space of Palestine itself but also in the intimate microtopographies of homes, fields, and cemeteries.

person could construe (for example) "Dogs must be kept on a leash" to mean only some dogs must be kept on a leash so that, by extension, the

resolution must require Israel to withdraw from all the occupied territories.

McHugo's final submission moves beyond the hermeneutics of the text to reconstruct the drafting process and the debate within the Security Council, which confirms his central claim: that absence of the word "all" does not imply that "some" was intended.26 Israel ignored the resolution, however, refusing to withdraw its troops and declining to fix its boundaries. The Israeli government justified its actions by claiming that Gaza and the West Bank were not "occupied"

since they had never been part of the sovereign territory of Egypt or Jordan. Israel was thus an " administrator" not an occupier (so that the Geneva Conventions were out of place), and accordingly these were deemed

"administered territories" whose final status had yet to be determined. This argument was as bogus as it was self-serving. The principles of belliger­ ent occupation, including Article 49 of the Fourth Geneva Convention,

apply "whether or not Jordan and Egypt possessed legitimate sovereign rights in respect of those territories. Protecting the reversionary interest of an ousted sovereign is not their sole or essential purpose; the paramount

purposes are protecting the civilian population of an occupied territory and reserving permanent territorial changes, if any, until settlement of the conflict. ,,27 For the first weeks of the occupation the Israel Defence Forces (IDF) had a nominal policy of "non-interference" - so far as possible, everyday life in the territories was to be "normalized" - but Israeli political and military actions soon gave the lie to these promises. The economies of Gaza and the West Bank were rapidly fused with that of Israel in a dependent and thoroughly exploitative relationship, through which they became cheap labor pools and convenient export markets for Israeli commodity production. These colonial economic structures, together with systems of direct and indirect taxation, enabled the occupiers to transfer the costs of occupation to the occupied. Everyday life was increasingly constrained by the grid of occupation. Palestinians were caught in a network of identity papers and travel permits, roadblocks and body searches. Palestinian nationalism was criminalized; freedom of expression and association

were denied; and collective punishments like curfews, border closures, and house demolitions were regularly imposed on the population at large. Like all military occupations, Israeli historian Benny Morris concludes, "Israel's was founded on brute force, repression and fear, collaboration and treachery, beatings and torture chambers, and daily intimidation, humil­ iation and manipulation. ,, 28

This program of state coercion emerged in an ad hoc, hit-and-miss fashion. Its ostensible purpose was to maintain (Palestinian) public order and (Israeli) security, but as it became more systematic so it became

covertly directed toward encouraging Palestinians to leave the occupied territories. This policy of renewed cleansing was reinforced by a second, overt strategy of dispossession, as hundreds of thousands of Israeli settlers

were moved into the occupied territories in a sustained violation of inter­ national law. The ideological importance of the settlements was explained

by the Minister of Defence, Moshe Dayan, who conceded that "without them the IDF would be a foreign army ruling a foreign population. " This was not much of a concession, since the IDF plainly remained a foreign army ruling a foreign population: its mandate was provided by colonial

power not international law. The Israeli cabinet considered two options for the colonization of the West Bank. The plan proposed by the Minister of Labour, Yigal Allon, fastened on the eastern and western margins (figure S.S(a) ). It called for the annexation of the Jordan Valley and an area around

g

Jerusalem through the renewed extension of the rid of Jewish settlement; the core area of the Palestinian population, the mountain spine running . from Jenin in the north to Hebron in the south, would be granted limited autonomy or confederated with Jordan. The rival plan proposed by Moshe Dayan reversed this geography. It proposed punching "four fists" along the central ridge; each would consist of a military base surrounded by a circle of Jewish settlements linked directly to Israel by a network of

main roads. The cabinet decided to compromise. Dayan's proposals for military bases along the ridge were accepted, but civilian settlement

would take place under the aegis of the Allon Plan. Ten years later, when the right-wing Likud party took power from Labour in 1977, there were 1 6 illegal Israeli settlements in Gaza and 36 in the West Bank.29

Ironically, Labour's hold over Israeli politics had been weakened by the very developments it promoted. A war of position was fought over the basic template of Israel, in which Zionism's redemptive mythologies were

mobilized by Labour's opponents to focus not on the boundaries, citizens and laws of the state of Israel but on the spiritual and existential comple­

tion of the Land of Israel.30 The new prime minister, former terrorist leader Menachem Begin, wanted "nothing less than the hegemonic establishment

of a new Zionist paradigm, " as Ian Lustick notes, and he fulfilled his party's election manifesto to the letter. The West Bank was formally renamed "Judea and Samaria," and since for Jews these constituted the

civilian population has the right to resist military occupation but, following

Allon Plan

the same Orwellian logic, all Palestinian acts of resistance to " liberation" were now counted as acts of "terrorism. ,,31 While Begin was prepared to consider "full cultural autonomy" for the Palestinians, therefore, this could only ever take the form of administrative authority rather than legislative or territorial sovereignty. Begin remained implacably opposed to the formation of a Palestinian state. "Between the sea and the Jordan," he affirmed, "there will be Jewish sovereignty alone. ,,32 Not only was it impossible for Begin to contemplate Israeli withdrawal from Gaza and the West Bank, he was committed to erasing the signifi­ cance of the Green Line, increasing the number of illegal settlements in the occupied territories, and extending the colonial grid up into the mountains. This was, in part, a spiritual project - a climactic aliyah as Jewish settlement finally reached what the leader of Gush Emunim, "The Block of Faith," called "the sacred summits" - but it was also a political strategy designed to provide a constituency for Likud that would rival and ultimately replace Labour's in the earlier kibbutzim. Accordingly, Begin was determined to · create "facts on the ground" that would make it virtually impossible for any future government to disengage from these territories. The new plan drawn up in 1977- 8 by Matityahu Drobless, co­ chairman of the World Zionist Organization'S Land Settlement Division,

III CJ •

Areas to be annexed by Israel Areas to be ceded to Jordan Israeli settlement (1 966·7)

A Main Arab town

- Israeli link road •

- - - Jordanian link road

Figure

5.5

_

Israeli settlement block

• Existing Israeli settlement

9 Planned Israeli settlement A Main Arab towns I O mile� '--'-�.....J' ,-.--.---.-, o 1 0 lilomettes

(a) The Allon Plan for the Israeli settlement of the occupied West

Bank; (b) The Drobless Plan for the Israeli settlement of the occupied West Bank (after Meron Benvenisti, Eyal Weizman)

envisaged "the dispersion of the [Jewish] population from the densely pop­ ulated urban strip of the central plain eastward to the presently empty areas of Judea and Samaria. " These areas could only be seen as "empty" from the most extreme Zionist optic, but the intention, as Drobless explained, was to establish Jewish settlements not only around those of what he termed (outrageously) "the minorities" - the Arabs - but also "in between them," in order to fulfill Begin's ultimate objective: to deny the Palestinians a con­ tinuous territory that could provide the basis for an autonomous state (figure 5.5(b) ) . Protestations from the UN and even the United States notwith­ standing, the number of illegal settlements soared.33 By 1981, when Likud had been re-elected for a second term, all pre­

spiritual heart of Eretz Israel the territories were redefined as neither occu­ pied nor even administered but "liberated. " Once again, the existential imperative of Zionism was translated directly into a territorial imperative that severed the Palestinian people from their land. For it was plainly not the Palestinian people who were " liberated" by the Israeli occupation: how could it have been? It was the land itself. Under international law a

tense that this was a temporary occupation had been dropped. Drobless's scheme was reaffirmed in a plan proposed by Ariel Sharon, Minister of Agriculture and subsequently Minister of Defence, which proposed con­ ceding at most a few, scattered pockets to the Palestinians: Israel would eventually annex most of the West Bank. It was now official Israeli policy to establish what historian Avi Shlaim calls "a permanent and coercive jurisdiction over the 1.3 million Arab inhabitants of the West Bank and

Gaza. " By 1990 there were 120,000 Israelis in East Jerusalem, and 76,000

denied villagers access to their fields, and imposed restrictions on grazing,

Israeli settlers in Gaza and the West Bank, where their illegal settlements

herding, and even feeding their livestock.38 In the course of these struggles

had spread, as planned, from the periphery to the densely populated (far

there were two major victories: Jordan renounced its interest in the West

from "empty") Arab spine.34 Some of the settlers were motivated by reli­

Bank, and the Palestinians were finally recognized as a legitimate party to

gious ideology, but major financial incentives were used to attract other

international negotiations.

settlers, many of whom elected to move to illegal settlements that had been established within commuting range of the metropolitan areas of Tel Aviv and Jerusalem. These subsidies, grants, loans, benefits, and tax concessions to Israelis were - and remain - in stark contrast to the restrictions imposed

Compliant Cartographies

on the Palestinians.35 Can there be any doubt that this was - and remains

In 1991 the administration of President George H. W. Bush brokered a

- colonialism of the most repressive kind? "We enthusiastically chose to

peace conference in Madrid, followed by further rounds in Washington,

become a colonial society," admits a former Israeli Attorney-General,'

in which Palestinian representatives from the occupied territories insisted that any discussion had to be based on the provisions of the Fourth Geneva

ignoring international treaties, expropriating lands, transferring settlers from

Convention and on UN Security Council Resolutions 242 and 338. The

Israel to the occupied territories, engaging in theft and finding justification

United States accepted these stipulations, but Israel rejected them outright.

for all these activities. Passionately desiring to keep the occupied territories,

Even when Labour replaced Likud the following year, no agreement could

we developed two judicial systems: one - progressive, liberal - in Israel; the other - cruel, injurious - in the occupied territories.36

be reached. By the fall of 1992, Shlaim reports, it was clear that "the Palestinians wanted to end the occupation" while "the Israelis wanted to retain as much control for as long as possible." In order to circumvent

It was the trauma of colonial occupation and renewed dispossession that

this impasse, and to steal a march over those who had the most direct ex­

reawakened Palestinian nationalism and shifted its center of gravity from

perience of the occupation, Israel opened a back-channel to Yasser Arafat's

the Palestine Liberation Organization, which had been exiled first in

exiled PLO leadership in January 1993. Many of the Palestinians who took '

Jordan, then in Lebanon and finally in Tunis, to the occupied territories

part in these secret discussions in Oslo were unfamiliar with the facts on

themselves. A popular uprising broke out in Gaza and the West Bank in December 1 9 87. Its origins lay in the everyday experience of immisera­ tion and oppression, but it developed into a vigorous assertion of the Palestinian right to resist occupation and to national self-determination. It became known as the Intifada (which means a "shaking off" ) and, as Said remarks, it was one of the great anti-colonial insurrections of the modern period.37 It was met with a draconian response from the IDF, which imposed collective punishments on the Palestinians. The physical force of these measures and the economic dislocation that they caused were intended to instill fear in the population and to leave "deterrent memories" in their wake. Communities in Gaza and the West Bank were subjected to closures and curfews on an unparalleled scale; there were arbitrary arrests and detentions; people were beaten on the street and in their homes, and their property was vandalized; food convoys were prevented from enter­ ing refugee camps, and when Palestinians sought to disengage from the Israeli economy and provide their own subsistence the IDF uprooted trees,

the ground that had been created by the occupation - as Said witheringly remarked, "neither Arafat nor any of his Palestinian partners with the Israelis has ever seen an [illegal] settlement" - and crucially, as Allegra Pacheco notes, they were also markedly less familiar with "the political connec­ tion between the human rights violations, the Geneva Convention and Israel's territorial expansion plans. " By then a newly elected President Clinton had reversed US policy, setting on one side both the framework of international human rights law, so that compliance with its provisions became negotiable, and the framework of UN resolutions, so that Gaza and the West Bank were made "disputed" territories and Israel's claim was rendered formally equivalent to that of the Palestinians. Israel natur­ ally had no difficult · in accepting any of this, but when the Palestinian negotiators in Oslo fell into line they conceded exactly what their coun­ terparts in Madrid had struggled so hard to uphold.39 The "Declaration of Principles on Interim Self-Government Arrangements" that was finally agreed between Israel and the PLO promised a phased Israeli military

withdrawal from the territories and the establishment of an elected Pales­ tinian Authority in Gaza and the West Bank. This was, as Said noted, merely a "modified Allon Plan" that aimed to keep the territories "in a

state of permanent dependency. " But the devil was not only in the details, which remained to be worked out; it was also in the postponement of two crucial issues: the fate of the Palestinian refugees huddled in camps in Gaza, the West Bank, and beyond; and the fate of the illegal settlements that Israel had established outside the Green Line.40 Two years later an interim agreement was signed at the White House { "Oslo II" } that incorporated and superseded these preliminary under­ standings. The occupied territories were divided into three areas - "Area A," "Area B," and "Area C" - whose alphabetical rather than geograph­ ical designations confirmed them as topological abstractions produced by a strategic-instrumental discourse of political and military power. Area A was to be under exclusive Palestinian control {but its exits and entrances remained under Israeli control}; Area B was to be under dual control, with a Palestinian civil authority and an Israeli security authority; and Area C

was to be under exclusive Israeli control, and included all those lands and reserves that had been confiscated by the Israelis for military bases, settle­

-...... Jerusalem

City limits

Palestinian settlements o Under 3,000 o 3,000 - 6,000

\?

Over 6,000

Illegal Israeli settlements/colonies A Minor ." Major Planned extension

.,

Transportation - Israeli by-pass road ....... Israeli by-pass road (planned/under construction) =

Palestinian road

After Oslo I _ Palestinian autonomy After Oslo

1\

I!II!III Area A (Palestinian control)

IliII Area B (Palestinian civil authority, Israeli military authority)

o Area C

(Israeli control)

ments, and roads {figure 5.6}. The Israeli concessions were minimal - dur­ ing the first phase the Palestinian Authority would exercise full control over just 4 percent of the territory - and the preceding history of occu­ pation and dispossession ensured that any lands ceded to the Palestinians would be bounded by Israel and never contiguous so that they seemed much more like a series of South African bantustans limned by a new apartheid

10 miles

:==;:::::;=:;:::;,,-----....J' lO kiIomelres

than the basis for any viable state.41 The basic principles of the Oslo accords were thus unacceptable to many Palestinians; but they were nevertheless accepted by the PLO, and its leader was elected to head the Palestinian Authority. As Said put it, "Arafat and his people [now] rule over a king­ dom of illusions, with Israel firmly in command. " Arafat's rule was palpable enough; protracted exile had estranged the PLO leadership from the emergent civil society in the occupied territories, as the divisions between Madrid and Oslo had revealed, and on his return Arafat moved to install a regime characterized by a mix of personalization and author­ itarianism buttressed by an elaborate security apparatus.42 But it was a rule of opportunism that constituted a mere shadow of a state with neither depth nor substance. It nullified the Intifada, transforming the resistant contours of an anti-colonial struggle into a compliant cartography drawn in collaboration with an occupying army and, as Salah Hassan has argued,

Figure 5. 6 The West Bank after the Oslo accords, 1995 (after Jan de Jongl PASSIA/Foundation for Middle East PeacelLe Monde diplomatique)

entire process. Netanyahu had nothing but contempt for the Palestinians and did everything in his power to subvert the Oslo accords. Pledges to redeploy the IDF from Palestinian areas were not honored; the demolI­ tion of Palestinian homes was stepped up; and illegal settlements were aggres­ sively expanded in what Netanyahu called "the battle for Jerusalem." In May 1 998 a further agreement was brokered by Clinton between Israel

and the Palestinian Authority. This Wye River Memorandum did not materially improve the prospects for a Palestinian state, and yet Shlaim concludes that Netanyahu immediately emptied the accord of any real meaning and initiated "a renewed spurt of land confiscation," while "the Palestinians scrupulously adhered to the course charted at Wye. ,,44 The landslide election of Ehud Barak's Labour government in 1999 promised to resume the dialogue between Israel and the Palestinians. . And yet, throughout the Oslo process, including the administrations on either side of Netanyahu's, not a single illegal settlement was abandoned; the only prohibitions on building contained in the various agreements were on Palestinian construction. Between 1992 and 200 1 the Jewish population in East Jerusalem rose from 141,000 to 1 70,000. Over the same period the population in the illegal settlements in Gaza and the West Bank rose from 1 10,000 to 214,000. While the built-up area of the illegal settlements occupied less than 2 percent of the West Bank, their boundaries were over

Figure Sf Ariel Sharon points at a map of the occupied West Bank at Beit

three times the size (to allow for "natural growth"), and through a net­

Arieh, November 1 995 (AP Photo/Nicolas B. Tatro)

work of so-called "regional councils" they controlled planning and envir­

fully compatible with the colonizing imperatives of globalization. Its map

Bank was under the control of illegal settlements (figure 5.8).45

marked not a site of memory, therefore, but a site of amnesia. Said bitterly observed that the Oslo process required Palestinians "to forget and renounce our history of loss and dispossession by the very people who have taught everyone the importance of not forgetting the past. ,,43 Throughout the interim period of negotiations and implementations characterized by its protagonists as "the peace process" - Israeli govern­ ments switched from right to left and back again, but both Labour and Likud administrations continued to establish illegal settlements and to expand existing ones in the occupied territories ( figure 5.7). Soon after the assassination of Prime Minister Yitzhak Rabin in November 1 995, by a right-wing Israeli law student opposed to his government's "concessions" to the Palestinians, the threadbare election of Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud government in May 1996 was the single most significant setback to the

onmental policy in another 35 percent: in total, 42 percent of the West These illegal settlements were linked to one another and to Israel by a new highway network. The Trans-Israel Highway scored the border of the West Bank and moved Israel's center of gravity decisively eastward, while a system of " bypass roads" around Palestinian towns and villages reserved contiguity for Israelis alone: "Vehicles of Palestinian residents will not be permitted to travel on these strategic routes." By these means over 400,000 illegal settlers enjoyed freedom of movement throughout the occupied territories and into Israel, whereas 3 million Palestinians were confined to isolated enclaves separated by illegal settlements and their land reserves and by a series of Israeli military checkpoints. Camille Mansour calculated that a Palestinian leaving Jenin in the north would have to change zones

50 times in order to reach Hebron in the south - although both towns are in Area A - whereas an Israeli could cross the entire West Bank from

north to south or east to west without ever leaving Area C. "Instead of returning the population to civilian life after more than thirty-six years of occupation," Mansour continued, "this cartography scarred their daily land­ scape with countless signs of military control: watchtowers, barbed wire, concrete block barriers, zigzagging tracks, forced detours, flying check­ points. ,,46 This fractured Palestinian landscape, wrenched by brutal spatial torsions, afforded a dizzyingly surreal contrast to the centrifugal space reserved for Israelis, where the labor of representation invested in the bypass road network produced its own symbolic power. Like the German

Autobahnen the new highway network was a means to conquer distance "that also transformed the meaning of the territory it traversed"; it too was "a powerful allegory for continuity and progression, a historical tele­ ology and vision of the future projected into the landscape itself.,,47 The

Israel Yearbook and Almanac for 1998 offered a still more surreal render­ ing of the lie of the land: "The Palestinian Authority has built its own bypasses - crude paths usable for creating territorial facts and rushing. suspected terrorists to refuge" - while "rank-and-file Palestinians have carved their own bypasses, which circumvent IDF checkpoints and make a farce of security quarantines. ,,48 The farce, such as it is, lies in such a shock­ ingly perverted gloss on the intrinsic violence of colonial occupation. In the course of constructing this landscape of colonial modernity, inte­ grating and differentiating a space of hideous Reason, tens of thousands of acres of fertile Palestinian farmland were expropriated and 7,000 Palestinian homes were demolished, leaving 50,000 people homeless in addition to the millions in the refugee camps. During the Oslo process the contraction of the Palestinian economy was accelerated; as its territorial base fragmented, perforated by illegal settlements and scissored by Israeli closures, so it became disarticulated. The corruptions, monopolies, and profiteering of the Palestinian Authority played their part in this state of ' affairs, but the primary reason was Israel's policy of periodically closing its borders to the movement of labor and goods from Gaza and the West Bank. Unemployment soared and living standards plunged. Palestinians were subject to routinized humiliation and their human rights were violated day after day. By 2000 Israel was still in full control of 60 percent of Gaza and the West Bank. Far from setting in train a process of de-colonization, the accords had enabled Israel to intensify its system of predatory col­ onialism over Gaza and the West Bank. "The Oslo process actually worsened the situation in the territories," Shlaim concludes, " and con­ founded Palestinian aspirations for a state of their own. ,,49

Figure 5.8

Efrat, Israeli settlement on the occupied West Bank (© David Wells/

Topham/ImageWorks)

102

Barbed Boundaries Camp David and Goliath

The crisis came to a head at a series of meetings between Barak and Arafat convened by Clinton at Camp David in Maryland in July 2000. Israel insisted that the issues to be resolved had their origins in 1967, in its "Six Day War" that resulted in the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, whereas the Palestinians argued that the roots lay in 1948, in al-Nakba and the dispossession and dispersal of the Palestinian people. The distinction is crucial, and it turns not on amnesia but on active repression. In effect, the Israeli position valorizes a selective past: While the events which preceded and led to the foundation of modern Israel in 1948 not only remain unquestioned, but are in fact justified, those follow­ ing 1967 and the continued Israeli occupation of the territories conquered during this period (that is, the West Bank and Gaza) are deemed unaccept­ able . . . . Jews are the victims of the earlier and more distant chapter, while Palestinians are the victims of its more recent chapter. 50

The questions silenced by this (left) Israeli argument are ones of great and grave substance. What of the Arab refugees who fled in 1948 ? What of the expropriation of their land and property? The thrust of the negotia­ tions at Camp David was to rebut these questions and to secure the Israeli position on a post-1967 accord on three fronts.51 In the first place, there was no movement on the question of Palestinian refugees post-1948, and Israel flatly refused to provide any compensation for the appropriation of their property. "The most we can do, " the Palestinian delegation was told, "is to express our sorrow for the sufferings of the refugees, the way we would for any accident or natural disaster. ,,52 The dispossession of the Palestinian people was deemed "accidental," even "natural," rather than the deliberate consequence of geopolitical strategy and military and paramilitary violence. Its effects were accordingly sup­ posed to be short-lived. In fact, Barak likened Palestinians to salmon return­ ing to spawn: in the fullness of time, he argued, "there will be very few salmon around who still want to return to their birthplace to die. ,,53 In one casual metaphor Palestinians' desire to return to their homeland was dehumanized and recast as transitory, yet it would have been unthinkable for Barak to have described diasporic Jews in such terms. Then, since the Six Day War all six US administrations had more or less consistently adhered to UN Resolution 242 and its central thesis -

Barbed Boundaries

103

that peace for Israel would be guaranteed by its withdrawal from the occu­ pied territories - but Clinton obtained a Palestinian commitment to peace with Israel while continuing to treat Gaza and the West Bank as "disputed" territories whose final shape was to be determined through negotiations.54 Barak made a series of territorial proposals that ultimately envisaged the IDF withdrawing from 88-94 percent of the West Bank and parts of Gaza.55 At the same time, Israel insisted on consolidating or "thickening" its main blocs of illegal settlement, which would have confirmed the dismember­ ment of the West Bank into three almost completely non-contiguous sections connected by a narrow thread of land. This was a territorial for­ mation that Israel had explicitly rejected for itself because its boundaries would have been "twisted" and "broken" and many of its villages would have been separated from their fields (above, p. 82). And yet the "peace process" produced exactly the same torsions and severations. It depended on what Israeli architect Eyal Weizman calls "an Escher-like representa­ tion of space," a "politics of verticality" in which Palestine was to be splin­ tered into a territorial hologram of six dimensions, "three Jewish and three Arab. " Projecting this topological imaginary onto the ground, a baroque system of underpasses, overpasses, and even a viaduct from Gaza to the West Bank would make it possible to draw a continuous boundary between Israel and Palestine without dismantling the blocs of illegal settlements.56 Finally, the territory that Israel insisted on retaining constituted what Israeli anthropologist Jeff Halper calls "a matrix of control" that Israel had been laying down since 1967 and which would have left Israel in effec­ tive control of East Jerusalem and the West Bank yet relieved it of any direct responsibility for their 3 million inhabitants. "It's like a prison," Halper explained. If prisoners occupy (on the most generous estimate) 94 percent of the area - cell-blocks, exercise yards, dining-room, workshops - and the prison administration occupies just 6 percent, this does not make the place any less of a prison. The proposed Palestinian configuration was even more restrictive than this comparison implies, however, because the politics of verticality projected the matrix of control both above and below ground. Israel required Palestinian airspace to be brought beneath Israeli airspace, so that it would continue to command the skies above Palestinian buildings and low-flying helicopters, and Israel also demanded "sub­ terranean sovereignty" over the mountain aquifer beneath the West Bank. The result would have been the institutionalization of a carceral archipelago, an ersatz Palestine controlled by Eretz IsraeI.57

104

Barbed Boundaries

Barbed Boundaries

105

The Palestinians were not blind, and even Arafat finally seemed to under­

had in mind. He withdrew his negotiators from the discussions, and the

stand that his kingdom of illusions was vanishing. As one Israeli com­

meeting ended on January 27 without an agreement. Ten days later Barak

mentator put it, "the prospect of being able to establish a viable state was

was resoundingly defeated by Ariel Sharon, who lost no time in denounc­

fading right before their eyes. They were confronted with an intolerable

ing the "concessions" that had been offered by his predecessor.62 Sharon's election as prime minister fanned the flames of Palestinian revolt

set of options: to agree to the spreading occupation, to set up wretched Bantustans, or to launch an uprising.,,58 In September 2000 a new Intifada (the al-Aqsa Intifada) broke out. It was precipitated by the provocative visit of Ariel Sharon, by then the new leader of Likud, to one of the holi­ est places in Arab East Jerusalem.59 But like the first Intifada it had deeper origins in the protracted experience of occupation and dispossession made still more melancholy by the despair produced through the "peace pro­ cess.,,60 The IDF responded with astonishing violence; no Israeli civilians were killed by Palestinians until November, but by October Israel had already deployed high-velocity bullets, helicopter gunships, tanks, and missiles against the Palestinian population, and so the al-AqSa Intifada increasingly turned into an armed revolt. The IDF's tactics were calculated to goad Palestinians into a response whose violence could then "justify" - and be trumped by - the Israeli military's own ferocious actions. One Israeli commentator described the violence of Palestinian resistance as "a direct response to the violence of the occupation." Occupation

is violence,

of course, but the Israeli occupation has consistently ratcheted up the level of violence to the point where the IDF's operations have to be seen as proac­ tive not reactive measures in a long-term military strategy that is expressly designed to undermine the Oslo process and any negotiations whose terminus is the formation of a sovereign and independent Palestinian state.61 There was a final, desperate attempt to find a peaceful solution at Taba in late January 2001 , when the prospect of an imminent Israeli election underscored the urgency of reaching an agreement. Significantly, Israeli and Palestinian negotiators accepted that Resolution 242 should be rein­ stated as the framework for any agreement. Gaza was to be sovereign Palestinian territory, with all illegal settlements evacuated, but Israel pro­ posed to annex 6 percent of the West Bank for its illegal settlements there, which it planned to develop further, and insisted that it was "entitled to contiguity between and among them": an argument that mimicked the Palestinian case for territorial contiguity while maintaining the Israeli matrix of control. Little or no progress was made on the question of Palestinian refugees or on the Palestinian claim to East Jerusalem. Critics claimed that all of this was merely an election ploy, but it is hard to know what Barak

(and revulsion), but the gravity of the situation was exacerbated by a dra­ matic rise in so-called "suicide bombing" attacks on Israeli civilians. The first attack had taken place in 1 994. By September 2000 there had been

14 other such bombings, but in 1998-9 the Palestinian Authority had moved

against the two main organizations that claimed responsibility and the level of violence had been contained. Hamas returned to suicide bombings in January 2001 , Islamic Jihad soon after, and from December 2001 , when the number of murders spiked sharply upward, their twin campaigns were joined by attacks carried out by the al-Aqsa Martyrs' Brigade. These "mar�

tyrdom operations," as many Palestinians prefer to call them, reveal an ongoing Islamicization of the local population - and of the Intifada itself

- that has been fostered, at least in part, by Israel's marginalization of the secular Palestinian Authority. Some Israeli politicians have sought to reduce these terrorist attacks to a culture of violence that they claim inheres within Islam. The only way to "cleanse" the space of Reason from these "irrational" irruptions, so they argue, is to remove the Palestinians from

Gaza and the West Bank.63 But it seems to me that quite another removal is called for. These attacks, and the heightened militarization of the al­ Aqsa Intifada more generally, are the product of a profound, desperate

anger born out of the sustained and asymmetric violence of Israel's continuing military occupation of Gaza and the West Bank.64 The youth culture from which many suicide bombers have emerged, especially in the camps, is both communal and competitive. Ghassan Hage suggests that there is a sort of jockeying for symbolic capital among those for whom most other opportunities for recognition and worth have been systemat­

ically withdrawn. More recent suicide bombers have been middle-aged as well as young, married as well as unmarried; many are well educated. But

Hage's point remains a sharp one: it is through the colonial circulation of affect - through the continuous accumulation of the countless hurts and

humiliations of occupation - that martyrdom becomes a way for some indi­ viduals to commit themselves to what they believe will be a worthwhile symbolic life after the end of their physical life. 65 All that said, however, the scale and the systematicity of these terrorist attacks render them crimes against humanity, and culpability is of course

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Barbed B oundaries

neither a purely individual nor an exclusively Israeli affair. Militant organizations provide an operational matrix that at once encourages and enables these crimes to be carried out. While international law upholds the right of any people to struggle against colonial domination or foreign occupation, the Fourth Geneva Convention (on which the Palestinians quite properly rely for much of their case against Israel's illegal settlement and occupation) distinguishes between civilians and combatants and requires every effort to be made to protect the former from harm; its prohibitions against targeting civilians cannot be set aside by the actions of adversaries. Human rights organizations emphasize that Arafat's security apparatus did little or nothing to rein in the organizations that claimed responsibility for these attacks in 2001, before Israeli military incursions rendered it virtu­ ally incapable of doing so, and the continued bombing campaign threat­ ens to disfigure a struggle for liberation which, as Said and others have repeatedly insisted, is pre-eminently about life not death. I am aware that the IDF had done much to provoke these attacks, and that it has capital­ ized on them in its own murderous campaign of terror and intimidation. And, as I must now show, it also capitalized on the mass murders of September 11 to continue its own atrocities. But, as Mahmoud Darwish wrote in the wake of the attacks on New York City and Washington,

6

Defiled Cities

Can defiled cities be the outcome of our struggle? Have years of suffering, long days of vigilance in trenches, on hills and in tattered tents led to this? Harun Hashim Rasheed,

No cause, not even a just cause, can make legitimate the killing of innocent

Raise Your Arms

civilians, no matter how long the list of accusations and the register of griev­ ances. Terror never paves the way to justice, but leads down the shortest

path to hell. . . . For a victim is a victim, and terrorism is terrorism, here or there.66

Ground Zeros

HEN W

the Bush administration assumed office on January 20, 2001 its foreign policy was, at least outwardly, one of disengagement. Palestine was no exception. Faced with the new Intifada and the rapidly escalating spiral of violence, the White House closed its doors and opted for minimal involvement. Within days of the terrorist attacks on New York City and Washington, the intensity of Israeli incursions into the West Bank was stepped up. Tanks drove into Jenin, Jericho, and Ramallah, supported by helicopter gunships; houses were demolished, trees uprooted, and civilians killed and injured. Palestinians claimed that Sharon was using the attacks on America as a pretext "to enter the endgame" against them. "He thinks that the dust in New York and Washington will cover up Israeli

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actions here " one Palestinian official explained. "He is taking advantage , of the fact that no one is watching. "! But constructing such a space of invisibility required the substitution of another, carefully constructed space of visibility so that the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon would serve not only as a distraction from but also as a justification for Israeli actions. And so a political offensive was launched alongside the military one. "Acts of terror against Israeli citizens are no different from bin Laden's terror against American citizens," Sharon insisted. "The fight against terror is an international struggle of the free world against the forces of darkness who seek to destroy our liberty and ,, our way of life. 2 Edward Said, himself a New Yorker and deeply affected by the attacks on his city, was not alone in protesting that Israel was "cynically exploit­ ing the American catastrophe by intensifying its military occupation and oppression of the Palestinians" and justifying its actions by representing "the connection between the World Trade Center and Pentagon bomb­ ings and Palestinian attacks on Israel [as] an absolute conjunction of 'world terrorism' in which bin Laden and Arafat are interchangeable entities.,,3 The White House also rejected Sharon's diversionary tactic, and dis­ missed his substitution of Arafat for bin Laden as inaccurate and unhelp­ ful. If America were to secure the support of Islamic states like Saudi Arabia and Pakistan for its military response to September 1 1 - both of them allies in its previous interventions in Afghanistan - the Bush administration under­ stood that it would have to re-engage with the Palestinian question on terms that were markedly less partisan than those of the past. A fJ;agile ceasefire was cobbled together on 1 7-1 8 September, and Sharon reluctantly agreed to withdraw Israeli tanks and troops from the areas nominally under Palestinian jurisdiction.4 A truce was signed on September 26, but it ended within days of Bush announcing his support for the foundation of a Palestinian state. Sharon knew very well what the White House was about. Furious, he compared its attempt to include the Arab world in the American-led coalition to British and French appeasement of the Nazis in 1938 - a comparison that was as odious to the Arabs as it was to the Americans - and he warned the White House: "Do not try to placate the Arabs at Israel's expense. We ar� not Czechoslovakia."s Bush, equally angry, denounced the comparison as unacceptable, and when Sharon renewed the military offensive the White House repeatedly criticized the Israeli campaign of intimidation and incursion.6

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109

One incident disturbed this carefully calculated American approach. Exactly one month after the terrorist attacks, Alwaleed bin Talal, a member of the Saudi royal family, arrived in New York City to present Mayor Rudolph Giuliani with a $10 million check for the Twin Towers Fund established by the mayor principally to support the families of fire­ fighters, police officers, and other rescuers who lost their lives when the buildings collapsed. The prince fiercely criticized Osama bin Laden and unreservedly condemned "all forms of terror"; but in an accompanying press release he also drew attention to Sharon's diversionary tactics and the way in which Israel had intensified its aggression toward the Palestin­ ians. "While the United Nations passed clear resolutions numbered 242 and 3 3 8 calling for the Israeli withdrawal from the West Bank and Gaza Strip decades ago," he noted, "our Palestinian brethren continue to be slaughtered at the hands of Israelis while the world turns the other cheek." Giuliani was incensed at any attempt to diminish the singularity of 9-1 1 . He refused any linkage between the attacks o n New York City and Wash­ ington and events in Gaza and the West Bank, and promptly returned the check. "There is no moral equivalent to this attack. Not only are those statements wrong," he declared, "'they are part of the problem. »7 Throughout October Sharon defied American demands to retreat from nominally Palestinian-controlled areas of the West Bank. In fact, Israel repeatedly identified its attacks on the occupied territories with America's assault on Afghanistan, and Sharon instructed the actions of the Israeli military - the IDF - to be "packaged" so that "the elimination of the Taliban and the elimination of the Palestinian Authority" would be seen as "two parallel goals." "We are doing precisely what the US is doing in Afghan­ istan," an Israeli spokesman explained to CNN. But the comparison failed to convince many in its target audience. "We are not out to destroy this extremist menace [in Afghanistan] so that Israel will be free to build more [illegal] settlements or to eat up more Palestinian land," Thomas Fried­ man wrote in the New York Times. "Mr Sharon needs to realise that we are out to make the world safe for Israel to be free, not safe for Israel to occupy the West Bank according to his biblical map."s The Bush admin­ istration also rejected Sharon's tactic. As tanks drove into the heart of West Bank cities and scores of Palestinians were killed, the State Department was moved to "deeply regret and deplore Israeli army actions that have killed numerous Palestinian civilians."9 Washington was hardly on the side of the Palestinian Authority, but relations with Tel Aviv were so close to

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collapse that by October 3 0 it was possible for one commentator to sug­ gest that the sea-change in superpower sensibilities meant that "the cruel calculations of geopolitics [wouldJ continue to make Afghanistan'S loss into Palestine's gain. ,, 10 But the world began to turn in the dying weeks of November. By then, to the evident surprise of America and its coalition partners, the Northern Alliance was sweeping southwards through Afghanistan, and the Taliban forces were in full retreat. On November 23 the IDF assassinated Mahmoud Abu Hanoud, Hamas's military leader in the West Bank, and several Israeli commentators warned that this was certain to provoke a violent retaliation. They also claimed that such an eventuality had explic­ itly been taken into consideration by the military and political apparatus, and the act was either recklessness or a cold-blooded attempt to scuttle any projected ceasefire.lI In any event the response was not long in com­ ing. On November 29 Sharon arrived in New York City and made what he called a "solidarity visit" to Ground Zero. Over that weekend, as the Jewish sabbath was coming to an end on the night of December 1-2, two suicide bombs and a car bomb exploded outside a cafe in a crowded dis­ trict in the heart of West Jerusalem. Ten Israelis were murdered and over 1 70 injured. Soon after, another suicide bomb exploded on a bus at Haifa, murdering 1 5 Israelis and injuring 40 others. Sharon cut short his visit, but before he flew back to Israel he reminded Bush that the deaths of 25 Israelis were equivalent to the deaths of 2,000 Americans. The significance of the comparison was lost on nobody. Sharon insisted that the weekend's events had made it apodictically clear that America and Israel were engaged in "the same war" on terrorism, and if America had been justified in its military retaliation against al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan, then Israel was justified in launching its helicopter gunships against Hamas, Islamic Jihad, and the Palestinian Authority in Gaza and the West Bank. 12 Israeli attacks on the occupied territories immediately intensified. Missiles were launched against Gaza and the West Bank, helicopter gun­ ships struck at the Palestinian Authority'S compound in Ramallah, tanks moved into the scattered districts of Area A (which was supposedly under full Palestinian control), and the IDF blockaded Palestinian towns and villages. But Bush now firmly resisted calls to restrain Sharon. "Israel has a right to defend itself," a White House spokesman explained, "and the President understands that." The focus was, relentlessly, on the Pales­ tinian Authority and its security apparatus. The attacks threatened to bring down Arafat's tottering - "cash-strapped, ineffectual and deeply

unpopular" - regime. The onus was repeatedly placed on the Palestinian Authority to "end terror," even as its own security apparatus was destroyed by the IDF so that it was now virtually impossible for it to act against the militant organizations (Hamas and Islamic Jihad in particular) which had claimed responsibility for the suicide bombings. And there was neither admonishment nor caution from the White House over Israeli actions. On the contrary, senior US officials, speaking off the record, freely compared Palestinian attacks in Israel to al-Qaeda's attacks on America.13 On December 7 Giuliani, by then the outgoing mayor of New York City, together with his successor Michael Bloomberg and George Pataki, the governor of the state of New York, were invited to visit Jerusalem. They toured an illegal settlement on the outskirts of the city and visited the scene of the weekend's suicide bombings. Weeks earlier Giuliani had denounced any attempt to draw parallels with the attacks on America. Now he had no hesitation in drawing a reverse parallel of his own:

1 10

The people of Jerusalem and the people of New York City, and the people of America and the people of Israel, are shoulder-to-shoulder in the fight against terrorism. We feel a great kinship with the people of Israel. We always have, and I think we're even closer.

since

Septem ber 1 1

and

what's happened

here

in Israel,

The efforts to consolidate the bonds between America and Israel were gath­ ering momentum. 1 4 As the New Year wore on, the militarization of the occupation and of the Intifada reached new heights (or depths). On January 17, 2002 a Palestinian gunman murdered six Israelis at a bar mitzvah party in Hadera; in response, Israeli jets destroyed the Palestinian Authority'S police station in Tulkarm and its tanks and troops entered the city, imposing a curfew and conducting house-to-house searches. This was the first time that the IDF had occupied an entire Palestinian city. It would not be the last. Bush accused Arafat of "enhancing" terrorism, and the White House granted ' Israel its widest freedom of military action since the Reagan administra­ tion had turned a blind eye to Sharon's invasion of Lebanon in 1982: "Israel is seen as the equivalent of New York and the Pentagon."lS In February, following more suicide bombs and the launch of two home-made " Qasram-2" missiles from Gaza (which landed in open fields), the IDF launched a massive air and ground operation against Palestinian towns and refugee camps in Gaza. The scope of the incursions steadily widened as the IDF mounted a series of ferocious assaults in both Gaza and the

113

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Defiled Cities

West Bank. Tanks rolled into Jabalya refugee camp north of Gaza City, and into Jenin refugee camp and Balata refugee camp south-east of Nablus, the largest in the West Bank. Alleys and cinderblock houses were shelled from the air and from the surrounding hills; tanks patrolled the main streets; and holes were blown in the walls of houses as the army swept through the camps. In the middle of March, 20,000 troops reinvaded camps in Gaza and reoccupied Ramallah in what was claimed to be the largest Israeli offen­ sive since its invasion of Lebanon.16 By the end of the month even that benchmark was passed. On March 27, as they sat down for a Passover seder in Netanya, 28 Israelis were murdered and 140 injured by a suicide bomb. For American columnist Charles Krauthammer this atrocity was "Kristallnacht transposed to Israel" and "Israel's September 1 1 , a time when sporadic terrorism reaches a critical mass of malevolence that war is the only response." Within 24 hours the IDF had called up 20,000 reservists, its largest mobilization since 1 967, and what Tanya Reinhart describes as its long-'awaited and carefully planned offensive, Operation Defensive Shield, was under way. Tanks smashed into Arafat's compound and troops stormed into the offices of the Palestinian Authority in Ramallah. How often "defensive," in the official Israeli lexicon, means "offensive." "As with the American attack on Afghanistan," Krauthammer argued, "Israel is going into Pale­ stinian territory to destroy the terrorists and the regime that sponsors them." Krauthammer was simply repeating Sharon's own claims. In a calculated echo of Bush's rhetoric the Israeli prime minister had hailed the operation as the first stage of a "long and complicated war that knows no borders." He declared that "Arafat, who has formed a coalition of terror against Israel, is an enemy" and he vowed to eliminate the "terrorist infrastruc­ ture" that he claimed the Palestinian Authority had put in place. 17 What­ ever Sharon understood "terrorist infrastructure" to mean, the IDF had so far concentrated its efforts on destroying the Palestinian Authority'S police and paramilitary security installations. With Sharon's encouragement, however, the IDF now targeted the Palestinian Authority's civilian infra­ structure. First it shelled the buildings. "All night," Palestinian lawyer Raja Shehadeh wrote in his diary, "I heard the Israeli bombardment of Pale­ stinian institutions built after Oslo." Then its troops rampaged through the offices to destroy the record - the very archive, the institutional mem­ ory - of Palestinian civil society. "From the second week onward," Rema Hammami reported, "the invasion saw daily rounds of blasting entrances followed by ransacking, aimed at everything from the Legislative Council

offices t o the Ministries of Education, Finance, Agriculture, Trade and ,, Industry to municipal buildings and chambers of commerce. 18 Uri Avnery contemptuously identified the real objective. "The lists of terrorists were not hidden in the land registration books, the inventory of bombs was not tucked away among the list of kindergarten teachers. The real aim is obvi­ ous: to destroy not only the Palestinian Authority but Palestinian society itself. ,,19 In spite of this new and malignant focus - Amnesty International concluded that the military offensive aimed at the collective punishment of all Palestinians, which is illegal under international la�o - the White House still refused to condemn the Israeli attacks and incursions. The military campaign escalated throughout April. At the beginning of the month helicopter gunships, tanks, and armored bulldozers launched an assault on Bethlehem, and witnesses described close-quarter fighting in the city. Many of its residents were deprived of food, water, electricity, and medical supplies. Religious leaders pleaded with the White House to use its influence over Israel to halt what they called "the inhuman tragedy that is taking place in this Holy Land."21 Undeterred, the IDF pushed on into Nablus, Hebron, and Jenin. At last Bush told Sharon that "enough is enough" and urged him to withdraw his troops from Palestinian towns "without delay"; he was ignored. His Secretary of State, Colin Powell, took a week to make a staged journey to Tel Aviv; not surprisingly, when he finally arrived he too was ignored. The military invasion extended and tight­ ened its grip and yet, with Israel in control of six out of eight Palestinian cities, the White House press secretary could still announce that "the ,, President believes that Ariel Sharon is a man of peace. 22 As the attacks wore on - and Tel Aviv and Washington turned "peace" into a synonym for war - one of Palestine's most prominent painters and sculptors, Nabil Anani, drew attention to the grotesque reversal by erect­ ing a mock "Statue of Liberty" with its torch reversed on the roof of Arafat's ruined compound in Ramallah (figure 6.1). The pointed juxtaposition of "Liberty" with American endorsement of Israel's attacks on Palestine activated another irony. The Statue of Liberty was designed by Frederic­ Auguste Bartholdi, who had intended it to be raised at the Mediterranean entrance to the Suez Canal as a symbol of the nineteenth-century expan­ sion of Europe; it was to be called Egypt Carrying Light to Asia, in which a colonized Egypt was cast as the handmaiden of the West and itself­ validated "mission" to bring enlightenment to the Orient. The distress and deceit symbolized by the reversed torch in Ramallah thus illuminated yet another nadir of Orientalism.

1 12

I r

1 14

Defiled Cities

Figure 6. 1

Palestinian artists erect a "Statue of Liberty" (with the torch reversed) on top of a damaged building at Yasser Arafat's compound, Ramallah, October 2002 (AP Photo/Nasser Nasser)

In the spring the IDF was already busily demolishing houses in Jenin refugee camp and clearing paths for tanks and troops with giant Caterpillar D-9 bulldozers. When 13 Israeli soldiers died in a booby-trapped building on April 9, the scale of destruction intensified, and the center of the camp was painstakingly reduced to rubble (figure 6.2). "I had no mercy," a driver of one of the armored bulldozers declared. I would erase anyone with the D-9 just so that our soldiers wouldn't expose themselves to danger . . . . For three days I just destroyed and destroyed. The whole area. Any house that they fired from came down. And to knock it down, I tore down some more. They were warned by loudspeaker to get out of the house before I came, but I gave no one a chance. . . . Many people were inside houses we started to demolish. . . . I didn't see with my own eyes people dying under the blade of the D-9, and I didn't see houses falling down on live people. But if there were any, I wouldn't care at all. I am sure people died inside these houses. . . . I found joy with every house that came down, because I knew they didn't mind dying, but they cared for their homes. If

Defiled Cities

115

Figure 6.2 Jenin refugee camp, aerial view, April 2002 ( © David Silverman! Reuters)

you knocked down a house, you buried 40 or 50 people for generations. If I am sorry for anything, it is for not tearing the whole camp down.23

Almost a fortnight later the army began to withdraw, but international aid agencies and human rights workers continued to be denied access to the camp for nearly a week after the fighting had ended. When reporters were finally allowed in, they found "a silent wasteland, permeated with the stench of rotting corpses and cordite." "The scale is almost beyond imagination," wrote Suzanne Goldenberg, gazing out over "a vast expanse of rubble and mangled iron rods, surrounded by the carcasses of shattered homes" that became known locally as "Ground Zero" (figure 6.3). "Rarely in more than a decade of war reporting from Bosnia, Chechnya, Sierra Leone and Kosovo" had Janine di Giovanni seen "such deliberate destruc­ tion, such disrespect for human life": Sofas and satellite dishes hang from the crevices of third-floors of what were once family homes. A red curtain, peppered with bullet holes, flaps in the breeze. This is what war does: it leaves behind imprints of lives. A sewing

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Defiled Cities

116

1 17

Besieging Cartographies

Figure

6.3

Jenin refugee camp, April 2002 (© Reinhard Krause/Reuters)

machine with a girl's dress still under the needle inside a house with the walls blown out. A goosedown pillow, ripped, the feathers fluttering. A photo­ graph of

a child with

a bird hangs on a partly demolished wall.

Thousands of houses had been destroyed; scores of bodies were buried beneath the ruins; 1 6,000 people had fled in terror, and those who re­ mained were left to survive without running water or electricity.24 The International Committee of the Red Cross, Human Rights Watch, and Amnesty International all accused Israel of breaching the Geneva Conven­ tion by recklessly endangering civilian lives and property during its assault on the camp. Israel was undeterred, insisting that its operations were necessary, professional, surgical, and that no massacre had taken place. "Like everything else in our corrupted life," wrote Israeli commentator Yitzhak Laor, "it comes down to the number of dead: ten dead Israelis are a massacre; 50 Palestinians not enough to count. ,, 25 This is another version of the algebra of infinite justice, and the United States endorsed the same grisly equation: it first supported, then moved to disrupt, and finally blocked any attempt at an inquiry by the United Nations.26

'•It• .1·• ,

,

There were geopolitical reasons that allowed the Bush administration to reaffirm American support for Israel: most immediately, the fall of the Taliban had terminated the necessity for an international military coali­ tion in Afghanistan; more generally, the territorial designs for American Empire that had been mapped out by the Project for a New American Century had returned the Middle East to the center of the neoconserva­ tive stage. But what gave this reaffirmation its teeth - what gave it both voice and bite - was a series of parallels between the imaginative geogra­ phies deployed by America in its military assault on Afghanistan and those deployed by Israel in its military operations in the occupied territories of Palestine. The Palestinians were also reduced to targets, to barbarians, and to homines sacri: I will consider each in turn. Palestinians were reduced to targets through what Camille Mansour calls a "besieging cartography" that was sustained by an intricate system of monitoring. This involved passive sensors, observation towers equipped with day/night and radar surveillance capabilities, and satellite images and photographs from reconnaissance planes that were fed through elec­ tronic communications systems into computerized data banks for storage, retrieval, and analysis. This formidable arsenal was largely funded by American aid, and much of it was provided by American manufacturers.27 As the assault on the occupied territories intensified, however, Stephen Graham showed that the conflict was transformed into "an urban war in which the distance between enemies [was] measured in metres." Orientalist tropes were invoked to render Palestinian towns and cities as "impenetrable, unknowable spaces" whose close quarters were beyond "the three-dimensional gaze of the IDF's high-technology surveillance systems. " As surveillance at a distance became markedly less effective, therefore, so "a new family of Unattended Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) and camera-carrying balloons was deployed to permit real-time monitoring of the complex battles within the cities, and to track the movements of key Palestinian fighters and officials so that missiles could target and kill them. ,, 28 This was a strategically vital arm in the realization (and radi­ calization) of Israel's politics of verticality. "Every floor in every house, every car, every telephone call or radio transmission can be monitored," explains Eyal Weizman. "These eyes in the sky, completing the network of observation that is woven throughout the ground, finally iron out the folded surface and flatten the terrain." The opacity of supposedly alien

1 19

Defiled Cities

Defiled Cities

spaces is thus rendered transparent, and their complexities reduced to a series of objects in a purely visual plane.29 ; An example will serve to show what this means. In July 2002, when it became known that Hamas was about to announce a suspension of attacks inside Israel, Sharon and his Minister of Defence authorized the IDF to execute Salah Shehadeh, the leader of Hamas's military wing. This was a rerun of the assassination of Mahmoud Abu Hanoud eight months ear­ lier, but with a savage twist. On this occasion an IDF F-1 6 was ordered to drop a one-ton bomb on a densely crowded neighborhood in Gaza. The raid leveled an entire city block and killed not only its intended target but also 16 others and injured 140 more. The pilot was protected by his air­ craft and its armaments and also by the armature of cartographic reason: its doctrines of "objectivity" and " object-ness." Asked what he felt when he released the bomb over a residential area, he replied: "I feel a slight ping in the aircraft, the result of releasing the bomb. It passes a second later, and that's it. That's what I feel." He was not alone in his reduction of ordinary Palestinians to targets. Sharon described the atrocity as "one of our greatest successes," and President Bush merely complained that the attack was "heavy-handed. ,,30 But the disembodied abstractions produced within such an enhanced tech­ nocultural sphere have been perforated by imaginative geographies that activate other, intensely corporeal registers. For Palestinians, of course, the distance between detachment and engagement has always been vulnera­ ble to unpredictable, hideous collapse. Walking the streets of Ramallah, Hanan Elmasu recalled wondering "if suddenly the drone of the recon­ naissance planes that are often circling above us will disappear and be replaced by an Apache attack helicopter beginning to rain down bullets from the sky as I am walking to my friend's home. ,,31 But some Israeli pilots have also been troubled by the same perforations, and they have found it difficult to sustain the optical detachment achieved by some of their colleagues and by their counterparts in America's "Kabul-ki dance" (above, p. 54). One fighter pilot urged those who flew Israel's deadly F-16s "to think about what a bombing operation would be like in the city they live in. " He explained what he meant with an immediacy that pro­ vides a pointed contrast to the chilling detachment that I have just described: "I am talking about bombing a densely populated city. 1 am talking about liquidating people on the main street. ,,32 The ground war involved the performance of highly abstract spacings too, in which every Palestinian was reduced to a threat and a target. One

reporter described how, at the height of Operation Defensive Shield in Tulkarm, a reserve detachment of Paratrooper Reconnaissance Com­ mandos operated in "a peculiar state of sensory deprivation." Occupying a house seized from its Palestinian owners, the soldiers lived "in a kind of perpetual shadow," he wrote, "behind drawn curtains and under dim lighting, rarely venturing out except at night and then only in tanks or the windowless A[rmored] P[ersonnel] C[arriers]. Their knowledge of the battlefield [sic] is largely limited to the maps they study or the tiny corner of land they view when the [APC] door opens, and so anyone who crosses their path is viewed as a potential life-and-death threat." Yet here too the abstractions were qualified, their imaginative geographies perforated by much more intimate engagements, and many of the soldiers interviewed saw the military occupation as unsustainable on humanitarian rather than narrowly logistical grounds.33 It was not only the aggrandized violence of offensive operations like Defensive Shield that convinced some reservists to become conscientious objectors. It was also the everyday exercise of the power to humiliate at what Meron Benvenisti calls "the checkpoints of arrogance" that turned their stomachs. Benvenisti is a former deputy mayor of Jerusalem, and he explains that the function of the checkpoint "is to send a message of force and authority, to inspire fear, and to symbolize the downtrodden nature and inferiority of those under the occupatio n." Some conscientious objectors came to see that humiliation saturates both sides of the barrier. For the checkpoint also degrades those who are enrolled in its operations: "You become a machine of the check­ points" (figure 6.4 ).34 For all these reasons, over 500 reserve soldiers have refused to serve in the occupied territories since February 2002. Eight of them petitioned the Israeli Supreme Court to have their refusal to serve beyond the Green Line recognized as a matter of conscience. They claimed that the aim of IDF operations in Gaza and the West Bank has been to damage "the entire civil fabric" of Palestinian society and "to dominate, starve and humiliate an entire people." Their submission charged the IDF with systematically violating the most fundamental human rights of the Palestinian people, and argued that the Israeli occupation is itself illegal.35 Significantly, the court declined to rule on the legality of the occupation. While it accepted that the reservists' objections were moral ones it nevertheless upheld the prison sentences that had been imposed upon them for refusing to serve in the occupied territories. This decision tacitly recognized that the reservists' refusal to fight what they call "the War of the Settlements " presents a much

118

120

Figure 6.4

Defiled Cities

Defiled Cities

Israeli checkpoint, Tulkarem (© AP Photo/Mohammed Azba)

more serious threat to the legitimacy of Israel's politicomilitary strategy than conscientious objectors who refuse to serve in the IDF at all. For theirs is a selective refusal that exposes the territorial underbelly of Israel's aggressions. As Susan Sontag observed, "the soldiers are not refusing a particular order. They are refusing to enter the space where illegal orders are bound to be given. ,,36 The production of this space - its articulation and legitimation - was reinforced by the deployment of other imaginative geographies that also mirrored those used by America in its military assault on Afghanistan. The "clash of civilizations" was rarely invoked directly. Huntington himself had said remarkably little about Palestine, apart from the monstrous per­ version that the "fault-line war" in Gaza and the West Bank showed that "Muslims have problems living peacefully with their neighbours." He did acknowledge, in passing, the role of the European powers in setting the stage for the conflict, but said nothing at all about Israel's predatory actions. Robert Wistrich, a professor of modern European history at the Hebrew University, was more forthright. "It is a clash of civilisations," he wrote in the Jerusalem Post soon after September 1 1 . Not only had radical Islam devastated New York City ("the largest Jewish city on the planet")

121

but it continued to threaten the survival of the state of Israel. Columnist Thomas Friedman, writing in the New York Times six months later, invoked Huntington too, but drew a markedly different conclusion: "What Osama bin Laden failed to achieve on September 1 1 is now being unleashed by the Israeli-Palestinian war in the West Bank: a clash of civilizations." But this had to end, so he insisted, in an Israeli withdrawal from the occupied territories.37 These straws in the wind were blowing in different directions, but the imaginative geography that dominated Israeli policy dispensed with their dualisms altogether. Instead, it resurrected the opposition between "civil­ ization" and "barbarism" that had been a foundational weapon of Zionism and which the White House had also deployed in its "war on terrorism." Palestinians were represented as denizens of a barbarian space lying beyond the pale of civilization. When Barak had described Israel as "a villa in the middle of the jungle" and as "a vanguard of culture against barbarism," he was not only degrading and brutalizing Palestinian cul­ ture and civil society: he was also rendering its spaces inchoate, outside the space of Reason.38 What Sharon sought to do was to establish these linguistic claims in acutely physical terms. As Lena Jayyusi wrote from Ramallah, "There is no constative any longer: only the pure performa­ tive. ,,39 This is the heart of the matter because, as I have repeatedly insisted, representations are not mere mirrors of the world. They enter directly into its fabrication. Israel's offensive operations were designed to turn the Palestinian people not only into enemies but into aliens, and in placing them outside the modern, figuratively and physically, they were constructed, like whole sections of the population in Afghanistan, as homines sacri from whom the rights and protections of international law could be systemat­ ically withdrawn. The process was already in train, of course, but by invok­ ing the global "war on terrorism" Sharon and his government were able to radicalize its effects. As the siege of Ramallah intensified, Shehadeh recognized that, to the Israelis, We the Palestinians are terrorists and therefore anything they do to us is legitimate. We are treated as homo sacer - to whom the laws of the rest of humanity do not apply. . . . There is something pornographic about Sharon's repetition of the word terrorist. . . . Isn't pornography the denigration of the human being into a mere object, a mere body, and a toy to which things can be done? So with the Palestinians, who are now dubbed terrorists. They can be killed, disposed of like flies by the army's big machines without second thought.40

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Defiled Cities

It will be recalled that, for Agamben, homo sacer is constituted through the production and performance of the space of the exception, but in Palestine this process assumes an ever more physical form.41 On one side, a strategy of consolidation and containment continues to bind Israel to its illegal settlements and to separate both from the remainder of the occu­ pied territories; on the other side, a strategy of cantonization institution­ alizes the siege of Palestinian towns and villages. The first objective had already been secured in Gaza during the first Intifada. "Surrounded by electronic fences and army posts," Reinhart re­ ported, "completely sealed off from the outside world, Gaza has become a huge prison. ,,42 Barak had proposed the construction of a similar fence for the West Bank, but in June 2002 Sharon announced the construction of a much more formidable barrier network (figure 6.5). For most of its length this will be an electronic fence but in places it will solidify into a concrete or steel wall 8 meters high: Jabotinsky's "iron wall" material­ ized, malevolent (figure 6.6). The line will be flanked by a 50-1 00 m security zone, edged with concertina wire, trenches, and patrol roads, and monitored by watchtowers, floodlights, electronic sensors, and surveillance cameras. Barak wanted the fence to run along the Green Line, which is 360 km long, but under Sharon the barrier will be 1,000 km long and much of it will run far to the east of the Green Line. It follows no natural contour (and in any case armored bulldozers are supremely indifferent to topography). Instead, as Uri Avnery remarks, "it twists like a snake according to a single principle: most of the [illegal Israeli] settlements must remain on the western side of the wall" (figure 6.7). Thousands of hectares of some of the most highly productive Palestinian farmland will be on the Israeli side too, with implications not only for the beleaguered Palestinian economy but also for the subsistence of the Palestinian population. Dur­ ing the first phase of construction at least 1 5 Palestinian villag�s will be on the Israeli side, while others will -be cut off from their fields and wells, so that Israel will extend its control over the crucial central aquifer. The barrier is also intended to consolidate Israel's stranglehold over East Jerusalem, where again it runs deep into Palestinian territory and cuts off hundreds of thousands of Palestinians (many of whom do not have Israeli residency) from the West Bank. In March 2003 Sharon announced plans for a second barrier to be built around the eastern foothills and along the Jordan Valley, to connect with the first and so encircle the West Bank like Gaza. The Israeli Defence Minister has persistently represented the barrier as a security measure whose sole objective is to deny suicide bombers access

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Defiled Cities

125

to Israel from the West Bank. The route of the first barrier and the plan for a second make a nonsense of these claims, and when the minister adds that "this not a border between political entities or sovereign territories," it becomes crystal clear that the only sovereign power to be recognized is the state of Israel. What lies beyond the line is not the (future) semi-state of Palestine - confined to just 42 percent of the West Bank - but what Agamben would call the (present) space of the exception.43 This is the point at which the analogy between occupied Palestine and the prison breaks down, for this carceral archipelago limns the dispersed site not of the prison but of the camp. Agamben explains the difference: While prison law only constitutes a particular sphere of penal law and is not outside the juridical order, the juridical constellation that guides the camp is martial law and the state of siege . . . . As the absolute space of the exception, the camp is topologically different from a single space of confinement.44

Figure 6.6

Construction of the "Iron Wall," Qualqilya, August 2002

(AP Photo/Brennan Linsley)

Figure 6.7

The West Bank: Palestinian village, the "separation barrier, " and an illegal Israeli settlement, July 2003 (AP Photo/Lefteris Pitarakis)

On that other side of the line, therefore, Israel has set about the prolifer­ ation of zones of indistinction in which, as the reservists who refuse to serve in the occupied territories claim, "the legal and the lawful can no longer be distinguished from the illegal and unlawful. ,,45 The baroque geo­ graphy of the Oslo process has been swept away; the quasi-sovereignty of Area A has been terminated, and all that remains is another Escher-like system of exclusion and inclusion in which Palestinian towns and villages are severed from one another and placed under constant siege from a military force that has now twisted the topologies of occupation into new and even more grotesque forms. In his original discussion of homo sacer, Agamben suggested that the space of the exception - and here we should remind ourselves that he was arguing in general terms because the con­ cordance with the occupied territories is agonizingly close - traces a threshold through which "outside and inside, the normal situation and chaos, enter into those topological relations that make the validity of the juridical , order possible. ,46 A delegation from the International Writers Parliament visited the West Bank in March 2002, at the invitation of Mahmoud Darwish, and their reports described the installation of these new topolo­ gies - the performance of their collective danse macabre - with shivering immediacy: The landscape of the West Bank and Gaza Strip has been ripped and torn like cloth made from strips of different materials. Barbed wire surrounds

126

Defiled Cities

Israeli settlements and military posts and the areas theoretically controlled by the Palestinian Authority: it protects and excludes, unites separated zones

and separates adjacent territories, weaves in between a labyrinth of islands that are mutually repelled and attracted. A complex circulatory system of

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areas, to the point of confusing the inexpert visitor as to what they encom­

More prosaically, the military correspondent for Ha'aretz reported in April that "there is [now] only one area and that area is controlled by the IDF without Palestinian intermediaries. " As far as the military was concerned, Amir Oren explained, there was no longer any difference between Areas A, B, and C: "The IDF is doing as it pleases in all of them." Israel had established a series of "securiry zones" throughout the West Bank (figure 6.8), so that Palestinians were now confined and corralled, subject to endless curfew and closure, whereas the IDF had complete freedom of , movement and action.48 As the Israeli Minister of Internal (sic) Security put it, "They are there, but we are here and there as we/l."49 The occupied territories have been turned into twilight zones, caught in a frenzied cartography of mobile frontiers rather than fixed boundaries. These enforce a violent fragmentation and recombination of time and space, which is nothing less than a concerted attempt to disturb and derange the normal rhythms of everyday Palestinian life. During the first Intifada many Palestinians elected to "suspend" everyday life as a political strategy. This was a way of reminding one another that these were not normal times, a way of reasserting their collective power and, by calling attention to their actions, also a way of narrativizing the occupation: all of which actively sustained the process of Palestinian nationalism.50 What I am describing here, in contrast, is the violent annulment of everyday life by the IDF through a series of military operations that is intended to paralyze Palestinian agency and - through its physical assaults on the Palestinian archive - to erase Palestinian memory. These deformations involve deliberate twistings - torsions - of both time and space. Time is at once calibrated and indeterminate: the occupying army pulverizes Palestine into a landscape where everything is temporary except the occupation itself. In one sense, of course, Palestinians have had

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that the Iraqi government did not mishandle the distribution of aid in the center and south. Second, the oil-for-food program was not intended to compensate fully for the effects of sanctions, which were supposed to do harm. That was the objective of the Security Council. As Cambridge University'S Campaign Against Sanctions in Iraq put it: "Suffering is not an unintentional side effect of sanctions. It is their aim. Sanctions are instruments of coercion and they coerce by causing hardship."72 But the coercion was double-edged. Saddam was undoubtedly skilled at manipulating the international sanc­ tions regime, and he orchestrated an elaborate system of "dividends" and kickbacks from foreign contractors to line his own coffers. He diverted Iraq's diminished resources into displays of conspicuous consumption that were intended for his personal aggrandizement: great palaces and mosques that punched his power into the landscape. But he also had a vested

179

interest in securing the food distribution system. Basic supplies were provided through a network of small government warehouses in each neighborhood - which created the impression that it was the benevolent Saddam who was feeding his people - while the rationing system in its turn provided the regime with a constantly corrected database on each indi­ vidual citizen. As Hans von Sponeck bitterly observed, it was by these means that "local repression and international sanctions became brothers-in-arms in their quest to punish the Iraqi people for something they had not done.'>73 Two events in October 1998 revealed the Janus face of a sanctions regime that used "humanitarian assistance" for geopolitical purposes. At the beginning of the month UN Assistant General Secretary Denis Halliday, who had been coordinator of humanitarian aid for Iraq since 1997, resigned his post in protest at the impact of sanctions on the Iraqi people. "We are in the process of destroying an entire society," he wrote. "It is as simple and terrifying as that. It is illegal and immoral." In his first public speech after his resignation, Halliday affirmed that sanctions were destroy­ ing the lives and the expectations of the young and the innocent. And later he was even more direct: "We are responsible for genocide in Iraq.,,74 Then, at the end of the month, President Clinton signed the Iraq Liberation Act. Its stated intention was to "support efforts to remove the regime headed by Saddam Hussein from power and to promote the emergence of a demo­ cratic government to replace that regime." The president was authorized to spend $97 million to train, equip, and finance an Iraqi insurgency, and a further $2 million was to be made available to Iraqi opposition groups fo r radio and television broa dca sting Funds were also to be channeled to the exiled Iraqi National Congress, led by Ahmed Chalabi: a group that, as the New York Times remarked, "represents almost no one." The news­ paper's editorial was headlined "Fantasies about Iraq." But the fantasies were not Clinton's, and neither he nor his administration took the pro­ posed measures seriously. The Republicans had pressured the president, who was simultaneously fighting impeachment and a mid-term election, to sign the Act. To the fury of its sponsors, he subsequently did little to activate its provisions. But, in the dog days of the Clinton presidency, Richard Perle railed against the persistent refusal to act. He also observed with relish that the Republican presidential candidate, George W. Bush, had said "he would fully implement the Iraq Liberation Act." And he added: "We all understand what that means.',75 I imagine most of us also under­ stand what it means when genocide is made to march in lockstep with " liberation." .

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Put your coffee aside and drink something else, Listening to what the invaders say: With Heaven's blessing We are directing a preventive war, Carrying the water of life From the banks of the Hudson and the Thames So that it may flow in the Tigris and Euphrates. A war against water and trees, Against birds and children's faces, A fire on the ends of sharp nails Comes out of their hands, The machine's hand taps their shoulders. Adonis, Salute to Baghdad (London, April 1, 2003), trans. Sinan Antoon

B lack September

"\VJHEN he addressed the General Assembly of the United Nations W on September 12, 2002, President George W. Bush offered three main reasons for a military attack on Iraq. The first was that Iraq had persistently defied Security Council resolutions and, so he said, possessed weapons of mass destruction (WMD): nuclear, chemical, and biological. Bush represented this as a "defining moment" for the integrity of the United Nations. "Are Security Council resolutions to be honored and enforced,"

181

he demanded, "or cast aside without consequence?" The second reason was that the Iraqi government had persistently violated human rights, and routinely used torture and carried out summary executions. The third rea­ son was that the regime of Saddam Hussein was implicated in transna­ tional terrorism and, specifically, in the attacks on America on September 1 1 .1 None of these charges was straightforward. To many Palestinians the first two confirmed America's partisan view of the Middle East. Israel has consistently refused to comply with United Nations Resolution 242, which required it to withdraw from the territories seized during the war of 1967, and Israel also possesses weapons of mass destruction, which con­ tradicts the UN's declared goal "of establishing in the Middle East a zone free from weapons of mass destruction and all missiles for their delivery" and securing "a global ban on chemical weapons.,,2 Israel has also per­ sistently violated the human rights of Palestinians both within the state of Israel and within the occupied territories, and its armed forces frequently resort to torture and summary executions {"extra-judicial killings,,).3 And yet, far from calling Israel to account before the United Nations, the United States has persistently protected Israel from sanction by the extensive use of its veto in the Security Counci1.4 These objections do not of course excuse Iraq from international sanc­ tion. But they surely raise questions about why Iraq should have been singled out on these grounds, and why it was supposed they demanded a military response. As Perry Anderson recognized, arguments about the war on Iraq need to address "the entire prior structure of the special treatment accorded to Iraq by the United Nations."s The answers are to be found in the narrative thread that I have traced in previous chapters, and in particular in the violent history of Anglo-American involvement in Iraq. None of this absolves the Iraqi government of responsibility. Saddam Hussein's regime was not the innocent party - not least because there were no innocent parties - but neither were its actions the single source of serious concern. Weapons of mass destruction are, of course, matters of the gravest con­ cern. Even Bush has described them, correctly, as "weapons of mass mur­ der," though he seems strangely reluctant to think of America's arsenal in these terms. This matters because Iraq is not the only locus of their devel­ opment, and it should not be forgotten that the only state to have used nuclear weapons is the United States itself {the Bush administration's dis­ dain for international law and international conventions makes this of more

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than minor significance). Although Iraq persistently obstructed the work of UN weapons inspection teams, its actions were provoked, at least in part, by equally persistent attempts by the United States to subvert the integrity of the process.6 Even so, by the beginning of 2003 those leading the searches in Iraq for nuclear weapons and for chemical and biological weapons the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the United Nations Monitoring, Verification and Inspection Commission (UNMOVIC) both affirmed that a substantial degree of compliance had already been achieved, and attested that they would be able to complete their work within eight months. The evidence of WMD programs and capabilities that US Secretary of State Colin Powell presented to members of the Security Council on February 5, 2003 failed to persuade most of them that Iraq posed an imminent military threat to the security of any other state in the region or to the United States. Subsequently serious doubts were cast on both the provenance and probity of the intelligence assessments used by Washing­ ton and London to make their joint case for war. Reports revealed the use of documents shown to be forgeries and of plagiarized and out-of-date information; the politicization of intelligence through selective and parti­ san interpretations; the omission and suppression of counter-evidence; attempts to discredit both Mohammed El-Baradei, director-general of the IAEA, and Hans Blix, executive chairman of UNMOVIC; attempts to smear and intimidate credible media sources, including Dr David Kelly, a senior adviser with UNSCOM's biological weapons teams and special adviser to the director of Counter-Proliferation and Arms Control in Britain's Ministry of Defence, who was driven to take his own life in July 2003; and the systematic provision of disinformation.7 None of this is surpris­ ing given that Saddam did not use weapons of mass destruction during the war, and that no trace of deliverable weapons has been found after the war. 8 Indeed, US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld admitted that they might have been destroyed before the war. As Britain's former Foreign Secretary Robin Cook remarked, "You have to admire his effrontery but not his logic. " It beggars belief that Saddam would destroy his most lethal weapons on the eve of an invasion, and it is much more likely that he did not have large stockpiles of them to deploy in the first place.9 Two American commentators concluded after a careful analysis of 'the evidence that Bush had "deceived Americans about what was known of the threat from Iraq, and deprived Congress of its ability to make an informed decision about whether or not to take the country to war."l0 In Britain,

similar charges were made against Tony Blair's Labour government.ll These are matters of the utmost gravity. A democratic politics requires the informed consent of its citizens, and a democratic state cannot go to war on a foundation of falsehoods. Violations of human rights are also matters of the gravest concern. The Ba'athist regime in Iraq was, without question, savage and brutal, and identifying other regimes contemptuous of human rights does not exempt the Iraqi government from international sanction. The Annual Report from Human Rights Watch in 2002 confirmed, as it had year after wretched year, that the regime "perpetrated widespread and gross human rights violations, including arbitrary arrests of suspected political opponents and their relatives, routine torture and ill-treatment of detainees, summary executions and forced expulsions. ,,12 But to demonize Saddam Hussein as absolute Evil - to conjure an Enemy whose atrocities admit no parallel is to allow what Tariq Ali called "selective vigilantism" to masquerade as moral principle. When Iraq was an ally of the United States, Saddam's ruthless suppression of dissent and his use of chemical weapons against the Kurds were well known; yet, far from protesting or proposing mili­ tary action, the United States supplied Iraq with the materials necessary for waging biological and chemical warfare, and protected it from sanc­ tion by both Congress and the United Nations. When coalition troops un­ covered mass graves of Iraqis who had been killed by Saddam's forces during the Shi'a uprisings in 1991, Blair claimed that this justified the war: and yet the United States had encouraged the rebellion and then did nothing to aid the rebelsY To suppress this recent history is to assemble a case for war out of a just-in-time morality: flexible, expedient, and eminently disposable. Both American and British governments had been presented with unflinching evidence of human rights abuses within Iraq for decades, and had been stoic in their indifference. "Salam Pax," the young Iraqi architect whose weblog from Baghdad attracted 20,000 visits a day dur­ ing the war, expressed an understandable contempt for such "defenders" of human rights:

182

Thank you for your keen interest in the human rights situation in my coun­ try. Thank you for turning a blind eye for thirty years. . . . Thank you for ignoring all human rights organizations when it came to the plight of the Iraqi people. . . . So what makes you so worried about how I manage to live in this shithole now? You had the reports all the time and you knew. What makes today different [from] a year ago?14

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War

The answer, it seems, was "not much." In the months and even weeks before the conflict began, it was still being claimed that bloodshed could be averted if Iraq made a full and complete disclosure of its weapons of mass destruction, so that the resolve to come to the aid of the suffering Iraqi people was evidently less than steel-clad. Yet "liberty for the Iraqi people is a great moral cause," Bush told the UN General Assembly on September 12. "Free societies do not intimidate through cruelty and con­ quest." If we were wrong about weapons of mass destruction, Blair told the United States Congress in his post-war address, "history will forgive us [because we] have destroyed a threat that, at its least, is responsible for inhuman carnage and suffering. ,, 15 Bush praised Blair's speech for its "moral clarity." And yet his argument - the high point of his address not only slithered away from the causus belli that the two of them had declared before the war began; it also concealed their continuing complicity with serial abusers of human rights. If attacking Iraq was a humanitarian imperative, as both Bush and Blair claimed, then the inclusion of states such as Uzbekistan and Turkmenistan in the international coalition they cobbled together made a mockery of the moral purpose of the mission. In fact, of the 30 states willing to be identified as members of the coali­ tion - 15 preferred to remain anonymous - the State Department's own survey of human rights identified no less than 18 as having "poor or extremely poor" records in the very area that was now supposed to have provided such compelling grounds for military intervention. Once again, as Amnesty International complained, human rights records were being used in a selective fashion to further political objectives and to legitimize military violence. Human Rights Watch was even sharper in its criticism. The organization had no illusions about Saddam's vicious inhumanity. It had circled the globe throughout the 1990s trying to find a government (any government) willing to institute legal proceedings against the Iraqi regime for genocide: but without success. Its executive director noted that the war was not primarily about humanitarian intervention, which was at best a subsidiary motivation, but he also argued that it did not meet the minimum standards necessary for military action on such grounds. Precisely because military action entails a substantial risk of large-scale death and destruction, he believed that it should only be undertaken as a last resort, when all other options have been closed off, and then only to prevent ongoing or imminent genocide or other forms of mass slaughter. It is simply wrong, he concluded, to use military action to · address atro­ cities that were ignored in the past.16

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The rhetorical force of Bush's first two charges was magnified by the third: the president represented an attack on Iraq as another front in the "war on terrorism" that he had declared after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. In the weeks after September 1 1 Rumsfeld asked the CIA on ten separate occasions to find evidence linking Iraq to the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and each time the agency drew a blank; Britain's Joint Intelligence Committee reached the same conclusion. Still, from the summer of 2002, as the administra­ tion started to agitate for "regime change" in Iraq, both the president and his Secretary of Defense made increasingly sweeping claims about connec­ tions between al-Qaeda and Saddam Hussein's regime until, by September, Bush was insisting that the two were "already virtually indistinguishable." "Imagine, a September 1 1 with weapons of mass destruction," Rumsfeld warned on CBS Television's Face the Nation. "It's not three thousand it's tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children. ,,17 It was thus no accident that the president elected to address the UN General Assembly on September 12, 2002, "one year and one day after a terrorist attack brought grief to my country and to many citizens of our world." Later in his speech Bush returned to the theme: Above all our principles and our security are challenged today by outlaw groups and regimes that accept no law of morality and have no limit to their violent intentions. In the attacks on America a year ago, we saw the destruc­ tive intentions of our enemies. This threat hides within many nations, includ­ ing my own. In cells and camps, terrorists are plotting further destruction, and building new bases for their war against civilization. And our greatest fear is that terrorists will find a shortcut to their mad ambitions when an outlaw regime supplies them with the new technologies to kill on a massive scale. In one place - in one regime we find all these dangers, in their most lethal and aggressive forms . . . . Iraq continues to shelter and support terrorist organizations . . . and al-Qaeda terrorists escaped from Afghanistan and are known to be in Iraq.18

One month later Congress passed a joint resolution authorizing the use of United States Armed Forces against Iraq. The text of the resolution is instructive. It claimed that "Iraq both poses a continuing threat to the national security of the United States and international peace and secur­ ity in the Persian Gulf region and remains in material and unacceptable breach of its international obligations by, amongst other things, continu­ ing to possess and develop a significant chemical and biological weapons

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I have italicized the passages in which September 1 1 was invoked as a justification for war on Iraq: their cumulative weight is astOnishing, because there is no credible evidence that Iraq was involved in the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. I have repeatedly underscored the hostility between Saddam and Osama bin Laden, and the ideological chasm between Ba'athism and Islamicism. Many of those who advocated military action against Iraq conceded as much. Kenneth Pollack, director of National Security Studies for the Council on Foreign Relations, was at the forefront of those who urged the Bush administration to launch "a full-scale invasion of Iraq to topple Saddam, eradicate his weapons of mass destruction, and rebuild Iraq as a prosperous and stable society for the good of the United States, Iraq's own people, and the entire region." The fulcrum of his case was the need for the United States to invade Iraq as a means of what he called "anticipatory self-defense" against the use ofWMD, and Pollack advocated using United Nations weapons inspectors "to create a pretext." But he was equally clear that "as best we can tell, Iraq was not involved in the terrorist attacks of September 1 1, 2001. American intelligence officials have repeatedly affirmed that they can't connect Baghdad to the attacks despite Herculean labors to do so." Attempts to link Saddam to al-Qaeda fared no better: "Neither side wanted to have much to do with the other and they mostly went their separate ways. After all, Saddam Hussein is an avowed secularist who has killed far more Muslim clerics than he has American soldiers. ,,20 In Pollack's view the significance of September 1 1 was strategic. It fanned the flames of domestic and international support - even enthusiasm - for military action against Iraq. The attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and the war in Afghanistan, had prepared the ground for the American public to accept future military interventions with equanimity, and although Pollack was concerned that the window of opportunity might close, that "the sense of threat" might dissipate, the administration issued regular terrorism alerts and threat assessments that kept fear alive. "Fear is in the air," wrote Jacqueline Rose:

capability, actively seeking a nuclear weapons capability, and supporting and harboring terrorist organizations"; that "Iraq persists in violating reso­ lutions of the United Nations Security Council by continuing to engage in brutal repression of its civilian population"; that "members ofal Qaida,

an organization bearing responsibility for attacks on the United States, its citizens and interests, including the attacks that occurred on September 1 1 , 2001, are known to be in Iraq"; that "the attacks on the United States of September 1 1 , 2001, underscored the gravity of the threat posed by the acquisition of weapons of mass destruction by international terrorist organizations"; and that there is a risk that "the current Iraqi regime will

either employ these weapons to launch a surprise attack against the United States or its Armed Forces or provide them to international terrorists who would do so." The resolution also noted that Congress had already taken steps to pursue the "war on terrorism," including actions against "those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized or committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 1 1, 2001, or harbored such persons or organizations," and that the president and Congress were determined to continue "to take all appropriate actions against international terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized or committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 1 1, 2001, or har­ bored such persons or organizations." Finally, the resolution empowered the president to use the armed forces of the United States "as he deems appropriate" on condition that he advised Congress that: ( 1 ) reliance by the United States on further diplomatic or other peaceful means alone either (A) will not adequately protect the national security of the United States against the continued threat posed by Iraq or (B) is not likely to lead to enforcement of all relevant United Nations Security Council resolutions regarding Iraq; and (2) acting pursuant to this joint resolution is consistent with the United States and other countries continuing to take all the necessary actions against inter­ national terrorists and terrorist organizations, including those nations, organizations, or persons who planned, authorized or committed or aided the terrorist attacks that occurred on September 1 1 , 2001. 19

Bush made these twin declarations to Congress by letter on March 1 8, 2003.

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It is being manipulated to ratchet up the fever of war. . . . We are being asked to enter into a state of infinite war. . . . Fear of the unknown is of course the most powerful fear of all, because it tells us that we are v Inerable ways that we cannot control. . . . Behind the argument for war, therefore, we can glimpse another fear - the fear of impotence.21

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Pollack thought that September 1 1 would also dispose other govern­ ments to grant the Bush administration considerable freedom of action. He argued that it would be much easier to capitalize on this new-found tolerance "if the United States could point to a smoking gun with Iraqi fingerprints on it." "Unfortunately" - his qualifier, not mine - "the evid­ ence regarding the September 1 1 attacks continues to point entirely to al-Qaeda." This was a crucial concession. While Pollack believed that an invasion of Iraq was necessary, he accepted that the need to advance the "war on terror" against al-Qaeda "should take precedence over invad­ ing Iraq." Not only were these separate objectives; the one trumped the other.22 And yet the Bush administration systematically, deliberately, blurred the lines between the two. In his State of the Union address on January 28, 2003 Bush again summoned the specter of September 1 1 to his aid. "Imagine those 19 hijackers with other weapons and other plans - this time armed by Saddam Hussein," he said. "It would take one vial, one canister, one crate slipped into this country to bring a day of horror like none we have ever known." As Robert Byrd put it in a speech to the Senate, "the face of Osama bin Laden morphed into that of Sad dam Hussein.,,23 One member of the United States diplomatic corps, John Brady Kiesling, resigned his post for precisely these reasons:

House press secretary Ari Fleischer claimed that "We're really dealing with elements of terrorism inside Iraq that are being employed now against our troops." The State Department defines terrorism as "premeditated, politically motivated violence propagated against noncombatant targets," however, so attacks on troops do not qualify. But describing Iraqi tactics in these terms artfully reinforced the claim that Iraq was connected to September 1 1 . Then again, the Stars and Stripes draped over the face of Saddam Hussein as his statue was toppled before a crowd of journalists in Baghdad was said to have been the flag flying from the Pentagon when it was attacked on September 1 1 . As one reporter wryly observed, this was by any measure an astonishing coincidence.2s Finally, Bush's announce­ ment of the end of "major combat operations" in Iraq on May 1, 2003 was staged to clinch the identification of Iraq with the war on terrorism. The president first made a dramatic tailhook landing on the deck of the USS Abraham Lincoln, which had returned from the Gulf and was lying off San Diego. Still dressed in his flying suit, Bush linked what he called "the battle of Iraq" to the "battle of Afghanistan." Both of them were victories in "a war on terror that began on September 1 1, 2001," he de­ clared, "and still goes on." Characterizing Saddam as "an ally of al-Qaeda," Bush insisted that "the liberation of Iraq is a crucial advance in the cam­ paign against terror." And he reassured his audience that "we have not forgotten the victims of September 1 1 . ,,26 This speech - and its calculated staging - was perhaps the most cynical gesture of all. Here is Senator Byrd again:

[Wje have not seen such systematic distortion of intelligence, such systematic manipulation of American public opinion, since Vietnam . . . . We spread dis­ proportionate terror and confusion in the public mind, arbitrarily linking the unrelated problems of terrorism and Iraq. The result, and perhaps the motive, is to justify a vast misallocation of shrinking public wealth to the military and to weaken the safeguards that protect American citizens from the heavy hand of government. September 1 1 did not do as much damage to the fabric of American society as we seem determined to do ourselves.24

He was not alone in his skepticism. Among American cities passing reso­ lutions opposing a pre-emptive strike on Iraq without the authority of the United Nations were the twin targets of September 1 1 : New York City and Washington, DC. When the war began, or more accurately resumed, on Ma"rch 19, 2003, the Bush administration accentuated the rhetorical connections between Iraq and the terrorist attacks of September 11. In press briefings Iraqi resis­ tance to the invading troops included "irregulars" who, when they used subterfuge to attack American troops, suddenly became "terrorists." White

It may make for grand theater to describe Saddam Hussein as an ally of al-Qaeda or to characterize the fall of Baghdad as a victory in the war on terror, but stirring rhetoric does not necessarily reflect sobering reality. Not one of the 19 September 11th hijackers was an Iraqi. In fact, there is not a shred of evidence to link the September 1 1 attacks on the United States to Iraq . . . bringing Saddam Hussein to justice will not bring justice to the victims of 9-1 1. The United States has made great progress in its efforts to disrupt and destroy the al-Qaeda terror network . . . . We should not risk tarnishing these very real accomplishments by trumpeting victory in Iraq as a victory over Osama bin LadenP

In these and other ways, as Richard Falk objected, September 1 1 was re­ peatedly appropriated by the Bush administration to further its own project: "Everything was validated, however imprudent, immoral and , illegal. Anti-terrorism provided a welcome blanket of geopolitical disguise. , 28

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When "major combat operations" had supposedly ended, Bush tired of toying under the covers. "We've had no evidence that Saddam Hussein was involved with September 1 1 th," he admitted, and his Orwellian press secretary insisted that the White House had never claimed the existence of such a link.29 What, then, were the other grounds for war? Its critics identified two. The first was - inevitably - oil. Opponents claimed that the resumed war on Iraq was merely another move in the Great Game in which President Bush's father had been a key player in 1 990-1, and which reached right back to the advance of British troops from Basra through Baghdad to Mosul in the First World War: in other words, "blood for oil." Iraq's proven oil reserves - over 1 12 billion barrels, around 1 1 percent of the world's total - are second only to those of Saudi Arabia, and new exploration techno­ logies hold out the prospect of doubling this to around 250 billion barrels, which would allow Iraq to rival the petro-power of Saudi Arabia. Revers­ ing the position of its predecessor in 1 990-1, this was n9w an attractive proposition to the White House for two reasons. Since the fall in oil prices in 1998-9 Saudi Arabia had developed closer relations with Iran, and the two states had driven the price of oil above the threshold at which the US was comfortable. Saudi Arabia had signaled that its oil policy would no longer be subservient to American interests, and Washington's fears about the unreliability of the Saudis had been heightened by September 1 1 . Most of the hijackers were Saudi citizens, and one Pentagon briefing paper claimed that "the Saudis are active at every level of the terror chain, from planners to financiers, from cadre to foot-soldier, from ideologist to cheer-Ieader."30 These concerns were aggravated by signs of growing internal opposition to the Saudi regime and renewed doubts about its long-term stability. In these compounding circumstances, Iraqi oil came to be seen as a strate­ gic asset that would enable a compliant successor-state to displace an in­ creasingly volatile Saudi Arabia as the pivotal "swing" producer. Indeed, an influential American report, Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for the Twenty-First Century, noted in April 2001 that Iraq had already effec­ tively become "a key 'swing' producer . . . turning its taps on and off when it has felt such action was in its strategic interest," and had warned that Saudi Arabia's role in countering these effects "should not be taken for granted.,,3 l It seemed like a "two-for-one sale," according to Thomas Fried­ man: "Destroy Saddam and destabilize OPEC. ,,32 But the Bush II administration was not as oil-savvy as the Bush I administration. In principle, as the US Department of Energy noted,

Iraq's production costs are amongst the lowest in the world. Its fields can be tapped by shallow wells, and in their most productive phase the oil rises rapidly to the surface under pressure. In fact, however, on the eve of war Iraq had the lowest yield of any major oil producer - around 0.8 per­ cent of its potential output; only 1 5 of its 74 known oilfields had been developed - and it was producing at most 2.5 million barrels per day (MBD). Washington hawks originally entertained fantasies of output rapidly soar­ ing to 7 MBD, but this turned out to be an extremely expensive proposi­ tion. Rapid extraction had allowed water to seep into both the Kirkuk and Rumaila fields, and this had seriously compromised the reserves: recov­ ery rates were far below industry norms. Repairing Iraq's existing oil wells and pipelines will cost more than $ 1 billion, and raising oil production to even 3.5 MBD will take at least three years and require another $8 bil­ lion to be invested in facilities and another $20 billion for repairs to the electricity grid that powers the pumps and refineries. There were certainly opportunities here for oil-service companies such as Halliburton and the Bechtel Group, which have close ties to senior members of the Bush administration, but multinational oil companies would require the formation of a stable and sovereign government in Iraq that could underwrite contracts and guarantee the security of theSe massive, long-term capital investments. It would be absurd to discount Iraqi oil altogether - as Paul Wolfowitz remarked, Iraq "floats on a sea of oil" - but it would be mis­ leading to trumpet this as the sole reason for war.33 The other reason adduced by critics was the exercise of sovereign power itself. I say "reason," but for David Hare there was no reason: the Bush administration was "deliberately declaring that the only criterion of power shall now be power itself.,,34 Or, more accurately perhaps, the only criterion of power would now be American power. This had been given formal expression in the National Security Strategy of the United States, published in September 2002. In his foreword, the president declared that "terrorists and tyrants" were the "enemies of civilization," repeated his concern that the one would be armed by the other with "catastrophic tech­ nologies," and vowed that the United States would act against "such emerg­ ing threats before they are fully formed." The last clause was crucial. Although the doctrine of deterrence had successfully contained the men­ ace of the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the Strategy argued that it had no purchase on these new constellations whose reckless unreason required, in specified circumstances and in response to a "specific threat," a doctrine of "pre-emptive self-defence."35 The Strategy recognized that

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191

Table 8. 1

Table 8.2

Security Council vetoes, 1970-2002 1 980-1989

1 990-2002

Total

13

31

9

53

US/uK (and sometimes France)

8

15

0

23

USSR/Russian Federation

6 (+ 1 with China)

1 970-1 979

Veto

US alone

Total

28

193

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192

4

50

2

11

13

89

such a doctrine transformed the concept of "imminent threat" on which international law was based. International law allows military force to be used in only two situations: either with the express authorization of the Security Council, or in self-defense when the attack is imminent and there are no other reasonable means of deterrence. The first provision is indeed problematic because it renders the permanent members of the Secur­ ity Council "absolute custodians of the legitimization of international force," as Walter Slocombe puts it, but this was not the focus of the Strategy. On the contrary, the undemocratic powers of the permanent members never bothered the United States when it was exercising them. Given that the Bush administration was so angry at the prospect of two other permanent members, Russia and France, exercising their veto powers to withhold autho­ rization for a military attack on Iraq, the full record of Security Council vetoes is instructive (see table 8.1). The figures in this table cast a reveal­ ing light on a dismissive remark made by Richard Perle, an influential mem­ ber of the Defense Policy Board. "If a policy is right with the approbation of the Security Council," he asked, "how can it be wrong just because communist China or Russia or France or a gaggle of minor dictatorships withhold their assent . . . ? ,, 36 This, I think, is what is meant by chutzpah. The British poet Torn Raworth captured its chauvinism with a mordant brilliance in the opening lines of "Listen Up": Why should we listen t o Hans Blix and all those foreign pricks[?j17

Global military expenditure, 2002 S US billion 2000

% global military

constant $

expenditure 42.8

1 USA

335.7

2 Japan

46.7

5.95

3 United Kingdom

36.0

4.58

4 France

33.6

4.28

5 China

31.1

3.96

6 Germany

27.7

3.53

7 Saudi Arabia

21.6

2.75

8 Italy

21.1

2.68

9 Iran (2001 figures)

17.5

2.23

10 South Korea

13.5

1 . 72

1 1 India

12.9

1 .64

12 Russia

1 1 .4

1 .45

13 Turkey

10.1

1 .28

14 Brazil

10.0

1.27

15 Israel

9.8

1 .24

Source: Stockholm International Peace Research Institute.

All of this irritated the White House immensely, but the focus of the was on the second provision for authorizing the use of military force. To wait for an imminent attack was outdated, it was argued, and made absolutely no sense against "rogue states" (like Iraq) and "elusive," "stateless" terrorist organizations "of global reach" (like al-Qaeda), which threatened to use "weapons that can be easily concealed, delivered covertly, and used without warning." It was therefore vital for the United States to "reaffirm the essential role of American military strength" - to build defense capabilities beyond challenge ("full spectrum dominance") and to establish military bases around the globe - so that no adversary would ever equal "the power of the United States." Bush called this creating "a balance [sic] of power." For the record, global military expen­ ditures in 2002 were around $784.6 billion US. The United States spent $335.7 billion, which exceeds the total spent by the next 14 states com­ bined (see table 8.2).38 Strategy

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The Strategy was festooned with candy-floss concessions about "expand­ ing the circle of development" - while "poverty does not make poor people into terrorists and murderers" it can make states "vulnerable to terror networks and drug cartels" - but at its hard core was a unilateral declaration that placed international law in abeyance.39 The attack on Iraq was consistent with this doctrine, or at least with the administration's inter­ pretation of it, but the fact remains that it was not consistent with inter­ national law. Perle subsequently said as much: "International law stood in the way.,,40 For the war was not authorized by earlier Security Council resolutions and neither was it authorized by Resolution 1441, which had found Iraq in "material breach" of its disarmament obligations and im­ posed a "final deadline" for it to cOI1J.ply. The resolution required the Council to meet to consider the outcome and to determine future action, and this possibility had been foreclosed when the United States and Britain declined to submit a second resolution authorizing military action against Iraq for fear that it would be vetoed.41 And most members of the Security Council were clearly not persuaded that Iraq - still less the fantasmatic conjunc­ tion of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden42 - posed a specific, clear, and credible threat to the United States that justified military action. In the event, only 4 out of 1 5 member states of the Security Council joined the coalition. Although the International Commission of Jurists warned that attacking without a UN mandate would constitute "an illegal inva­ sion of Iraq which amounts to a war of aggression," the line between legal pre-emption and illegal aggression was to be drawn - unilaterally - by the United States. Edward Said effectively turned the Strategy's indictment of rogue states against the United States to insist that its war on Iraq was "the most reckless war in modern times." It was all about "imperial arrogance unschooled in worldliness," he wrote, "unfettered either by com­ petence or experience, undeterred by history or human complexity, unre­ pentant in its violence and the cruelty of its technology": in a word, unreason aggrandized.43 But it was also, surely, about the assertion of American military power and geopolitical will. It is not enough for a hegemonic state to declare a new policy, Noam Chomsky explained. "It must establish it as a new norm of international law by exemplary action." Iraq presented the ideal target for such a project. It appeared strong - which explains, in some part, why the "threat" it posed was consistently talked up again - but in fact it was extraordinarily weak: enfeebled by the slaughter and destruction of the first Gulf War, by a decade of damaging sanctions, and by continuing air raids within and beyond the "no-fly zones." American

victory would be swift and sure. The United States would have prevailed not only over Iraq but also over the rest of the world.44 Sovereignty would be absolute for the United States but conditional for everyone else. As Salam Pax put it, "It's beginning to look like a showdown between the US of A and the rest of the world. We get to be the example.,,45 The strategy of the Bush administration was, once again, to present the United States as the world - the "universal nation" articulating universal values - and the war on Iraq became another front in its continuing fight against "the enemies of civilization": terrorists, tyrants, barbarians. There was something Hegelian about this materialization of a World Spirit - espe­ cially since Mesopotamia was one of the cradles of civilization - but the religious imagery invoked by Bush and others allowed many observers to see the coming conflict as another round in Samuel Huntington's "clash of civilizations." This impression was reinforced by the army of Christian fundamentalists, many of them with close ties to the White House, whose members were waiting in the wings to descend on Iraq as missionaries.46 But most attention was directed toward the clash of more literal armies. Columnist Thomas Friedman argued that the shock of the war on Iraq to the Arab world could be compared only with the Israeli victory over the Arab armies in 1967 and Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798.47 Although he didn't say so, both of those violent conquests spawned a different vio­ lence, the violence of occupation and resistance. This did not perturb the indefatigable Sir John Keegan, of course, who believed that resistance to occupation was merely "Oriental" outrage at Western military superiority:

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Islam achieved its initial success as a self-proclaimed world religion in the seventh and eighth centuries by military conquest. It consolidated its achieve­ ment by the exercise of military power, which, perpetuated by the Ottoman Caliphate, maintained Islam as the most important polity in the northern hemisphere until the beginning of the 18th century. Islam's subsequent decline embittered Muslims everywhere, but particularly those of its heartland in the Middle East. Muslims, convinced of the infallibility of their belief sys­ tem, are merely outraged by demonstrations of the unbelievers' material super­ iority, particularly their military superiority. The Ba'ath party, of which Saddam was leader in Iraq, was founded to achieve a Muslim renaissance. The failure of the Ba'athist idea, which can only be emphasised by the fall of Saddam, will encourage militant Islamic fundamentalists - who have espoused the idea that unbelievers' mastery of military techniques can be countered only by terror - to pursue novel and alternative methods of resis­ tance to the unbelievers' power.

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Western civilisation, rooted in the idea that the improvement of the human lot lies in material advance and the enlargement of individual opportunity, is ill-equipped to engage with a creed that deplores materialism and rejects the concept of individuality, particularly individual freedom. The defeat of Saddam has achieved a respite, an important respite, in the contest between the Western way and its Muslim alternative. It has not, however, secured a decisive success. The very completeness of the Western victory in Iraq ensures the continuation of the conflict.48

Ba'athism was not about a "Muslim renaissance," however, but an Arab renaissance, and its nationalist ideology was a secular one. It is true that Saddam's exploitation of Islam had intensified since the Gulf War, and that he used it to secure support for his regime both at home and abroad. Saddam claimed to be descended from the Prophet Mohammed, and the regime's rhetoric and its political iconography increasingly presented him as a devout Sunni Muslim. He established a nationwide "Faith Campaign" in the schools and the Saddam University of Islamic Studies. He embarked on a monumental mosque-building campaign, including two vast mosques in Baghdad that revealed how closely his promotion of Islam was entwined with his own glorification. The Umm al-Ma'arik {"Mother of All Battles"} mosque was completed in 2001 to commemorate the Iraqi "victory" in the Gulf War of 1 991, and the Saddam Grand Mosque, which was projected for completion by 2015, was intended to be the third-largest mosque in the world after Mecca and Medina.49 The regime portrayed the Anglo­ American invaders as "crusaders," and this view was shared by many Muslims around the world and affected the sensibilities of a number of prominent Islamic states. In marked contrast to its position in 1 990-1, Saudi Arabia refused to participate "under any condition or in any form" in the war on Iraq, and announced that its forces would "under no circumstance step even one foot into Iraqi territory. ,,50 This no doubt con­ firmed the American hawks' view of the unreliability of the Saudi regime - US Central Command was obliged to establish its regional headquarters in Doha, Qatar - but the House of Saud was acknowledging the anger of its own subjects. Huntington himself - who as it happens opposed the war and criticized the Bush administration - saw their point. "What we see as the war against terrorism and against a brutal dictatorship," he noted in a lecture at Georgetown University, "Muslims - quite understandably see as a war on Islam. "51 And in much of the Arab world, Susan Sachs reported, the war was seen as a "clash of civilizations." "What is happen­ ing in Iraq is [seen as] part of one continuous brutal assault by America _

197

and its allies on defenseless Arabs, wherever they are," she wrote, "a single bloodstained tableau of Arab grievance. "52 I don't think it surpris­ ing that Saddam's rallying-cry should have prompted young Muslims from the Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, Syria, and Yemen to journey to Iraq to fight. But most of them were not going to fight for Saddam and his regime; they were going to defend Islam and the people of Iraq. And yet this was surely not a "clash of civilizations." Although Bush said as much, his protestations were hollowed out by senior members of his administration, who dismissed the prospect of an Islamic state arising out of the ashes of Ba'athism {or Baghdad}: "It's not going to happen," Rumsfeld declared.53 But it was the opponents of the war, not its orches­ trators and cheerleaders, who gave the lie to these Manichean antagonisms. Global opposition to the war showed that Muslims and non-Muslims did not live in hermetic enclosures, "with malevolence their only messenger," as Yasmin Alibhai-Brown put it: "People otherwise divided" came together in solidarity "to reject the manufactured reasons for this invasion." Shahid Alam reached the same conclusion: If the thesis of an inevitable clash between the West and Islam still had any semblance of credibility, it was shredded by the global anti-war rallies of 1 5 February 2003. It is estimated that some 30 million people joined these rallies in more than 600 cities across the world. Significantly, the most mas­ sive of these rallies were staged in the capitals, cities and towns of Western countries. 54

Those "manufactured reasons," as I have tried to show, confirmed that the attack on Iraq was an aggression of unprecedented cynicism.55 But the cynicism of Bush and Blair in launching the war - and calling it Opera­ tion Iraqi Freedom to boot - was equaled by the cynicism of Saddam in using the genuine faith of millions of Muslims to try to see them off. Killing Grounds

"What will follow will not be a repeat of any other conflict," Rumsfeld declared on March 20, 2003, as a second wave of cruise missiles rained down on Baghdad. "It will be of a force and a scope and scale that [will be] beyond what has been seen before. " The war on Iraq thus began as a war of intimidation that always threatened to turn into a war of terror.

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For what is a campaign of "shock and awe" other than a strategy designed to terrify? Its purpose was to use America's overwhelming military force in a sufficiently "intimidating and compelling" manner to force the Iraqis to accept the will and power of the United States. Robert Fisk watched one of Saddam's presidential palaces in the center of Baghdad explode in a cauldron of fire. "When the cruise missiles came in it sounded as if some­ one was ripping to pieces huge curtains of silk in the sky and the blast waves became a kind of frightening counterpoint to the flames." The message was clear: "the United States must be obeyed." As Aijaz Ahmad commented, the message was delivered not just to the regime but also to the Iraqi people at large. "The intent is simply to terrorize the population, to demonstrate that if the most majestic buildings in the city can go up in balls of fire and sky-high splinters of debris, then every one of the inhab­ itants of the city can also meet the same fate unless they flee or surrender immediately. ,,56 But a different message had to be designed for American and British audiences, because it was not politically expedient for them to see this as a war of terror. In order to advance from the grounds for killing into the killing grounds themselves, imaginative geographies were mobilized to stage the war within a space of constructed visibility where military violence became - for these audiences at least - cinematic performance. I do not say this lightly. There were endless previews and trailers: drama at the Security Council, drumbeat scenarios of the conflict to come. The action movie mythology summoned up by the White House created heroes out of protagonists who not only broke the law - always to achieve a greater good - but who were above the law. Once the action started , there were special effects ("shock and awe") and artful cameos ("Saving Private Lynch"). There were clips and interactives on media websites, and a grand climax (the toppling of Saddam's statue in Baghdad). The Project for the New American Century's The Building of America's Defenses had described US forces overseas as "the cavalry on the new American frontier," and many commentators presented the war as a Hollywood Western (an impression that was reinforced when Bush gave Saddam 48 hours to get out of town). In December 2002 Mad Magazine parodied this cinematic ideology with a brilliant movie poster that its publishers ; will not allow me to reproduce here. "The Bush Administration, in association with the other Bush Administration, presents Gulf Wars, Episode II: Clone of the Attack." "Directed by a desire to win the November elections," its

credits warned viewers that "the success of this military action has not yet been rated.,,57 For all that, wars are, of course, not movies. What is at issue here:is the way in which the conduct of the war was presented to particular publics. I have repeatedly emphasized that spaces of constructed visibility are always also spaces of constructed invisibility. Presentation of the war was artfully scripted, and the 600 journalists who were "embedded" with coalition forces, together with the elaborately staged press conferences at CENTCOM's million-dollar media center in Doha (designed by a Hollywood art director) showed that lines of sight were carefully plotted too. But following the action on the Pentagon's terms is to lose sight of the role that the people of Iraq were cast to play. Above all, they were required to remain anonymous - merely extras, figures in the crowd, the collective object of a purportedly humanitarian intervention - because to do otherwise, to reveal the faces of the men, women, and children who were to be subjected to the pulverizing military assault, would have been to disclose the catastrophic scale of the suffering inflicted on them over the previous 12 years by the US-led sanctions and bombing regime. They were also required to remain invisible so that their country could be reduced to a series of "targets." The focus was relentlessly on Iraq's cities. In part this reflected Iraq's high degree of urbanization; 70-75 percent of its population lives in towns and cities. But it also mirrored the specter raised by the Bush adminis­ tration of mushroom clouds rising over American cities. It was as though one prospective nightmare could be made to disappear by the realization of another.58 From the summer of 2002 American media were previewing scenarios of urban warfare and building their audiences for the coming conflict. In late November CNN's classroom edition included a special report on "Urban Combat." Students were asked to study cities in "global 'hot spots' of current conflict" to provide them with the basis for designing a simulated city to be used for war games. Among the activities suggested, two were particularly revealing. First, students were invited to "discuss the challenges foreign troops would face in combat" in their simulated city "and how knowledge of that particular urban setting could be a valuable weapon for both sides." Secondly, they were to devise "a plan to prepare the American people for the human costs of urban war while promoting support for such an effort." These may have been simulations and games, but anyone who assumed that the assignments were merely make-believe

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only had to read the key words at the end. They included only one real city: "ambush; anarchy; asymmetric; Baghdad . . . ,,59 The military is no stranger to simulations and war-games, of course, and it has paid increasing attention to urban combat.60 Some of its train­ ing is in computer-generated virtual cities, but it also has a number of spe­ cialized training facilities. Perhaps the most sophisticated is the Zussman Mounted Urban Combat Training Center at Fort Knox, which was de­ signed with the help of architects, and pyrotechnic and special effects experts from Disney World, Universal Studios, and Las Vegas themed casinos. It features a city whose identity can be changed from one part of the world to another, with pop-up targets, and fire and special effects (such as exploding gas lines, collapsing bridges) controlled by a computer system; troops' performance is monitored through the Multiple Integrated Laser Engagement System. My concern is not that the military should have called on these civilian experts; troops plainly need to have the most realistic and rigorous training possible. But, as I propose to show, when these milita­ rized scenarios are returned to a nominally civilian public sphere in the form of media reports, computer games, or CGI animations in films, they hollow out specific conflicts, presenting them as disembodied games that, at the limit, bleed into voyeuristic entertainment. Many of the scenarios that appeared in the media were based on the Doctrine for Joint Urban Operations. prepared for the Joint Chiefs of Staff and published in September 2002. The report identified a distinctive "urban triad" that had significant effects on the battle space:

The emphasis throughout the report was on the city as an object-space a space of envelopes, hard structures, and networks - that had to be brought under control for victory to be won.61 A summary presentation of the study focused on one city alone: Baghdad. It mapped out the urban battle-space - the city's "geographic grids" - and then identified seven strategies in purely abstract, geometric terms: "isolation siege," "remote strike," "ground assault, frontal," "nodal isolation," "nodal capture," "segment and cap­ ture," "softpoint capture and expansion. ,,62 Again, I'm not so much interested here in the military performances of space and time choreographed by the report, and the other briefing papers made available to the press, important though these are, as in the ways in which the report's imaginative geographies were mapped onto the American public sphere to align military and civilian geographical know­ ledge.63 Here, for example, is journalist Ann Scott Tyson describing the deceptive geometries of Iraqi cities:

200

the three-dimensionality of urban terrain: "internal and external space of buildings and structures; subsurface areas; and the airspace above the topographical complex"; 2 the interactivity of urban life: "The noncombatant, population is characterized by the interaction of numerous political; economic and social activities"; 3 the infrastructural networks that support the urban population. 1

The report argued that "understanding the urban bartlespace calls for dif­ ferent ways of visualizing space and time." In particular, surveillance and reconnaissance "are hampered by urban structures, clutter, background noise, and the difficulty [of] seeing into interior space." Similarly, "the con­ struction of urban areas may inhibit tactical movement and maneuvers above, below and on the ground, as well as within or among structures."

Inside Iraqi cities, military operations would be vastly more complicated. Buildings constrict troop and tank maneuvers, interfere with radio com­ munications, and limit close air support from helicopters and gunships. Dense populations make airstrikes - even precision ones - costly in civilian lives. From sewers to rooftops, cities are multilayered, like three-dimensional ches�­ boards, creating endless opportunities for ambushes and snipers . . . . "Urban warfare is close, personal and brutal," says an Army report. "Tall buildings . . . sewer and storm drains, allow unobserved shifting of forces, and streets become kill-zones. ,,64

Similarly, James Baker described the city as a space of objects ("things") whose "three-dimensionality" posed formidable problems: "Upper stories of buildings may be enemy observation and sniper posts. S�wers may be enemy communication tunnels and ambush bunkers. Buildings block line­ of-sight communications, laser detectors and direct-fire weapons. It is a terrain of tunnels, bunkers, twists and turns. ,, 65 This is the language of object-ness again, cities as collections of objects not congeries of people. But it is also the language of Vietnam. Baker's last sentence evoked the jungle war against the Viet Cong and their elaborate system of bunkers and tunnels, and in the fall Tariq Aziz had warned that Iraq aimed to create "a new Vietnam" for the United States in its cities: "People say to me you are not the Vietnamese. You have no jungles and swamps to hide in. I reply: Let our streets be our jungles, let our buildings be our swamps. ,,66

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Time enlarged this sense of threat in a graphical illustration of "The

Perils" of the Iraqi city (singular). This showed a stylized, Orientalized street - hardly modern Baghdad - with "Iraqi soldiers disguised as civilians," "Iraqi soldiers faking surrender," tunnels and sewers "conceal[ing] Iraqi soldiers and arms," and "mosques, hospitals and historic buildings that US would prefer not to demolish [but] could hide soldiers or munitions" (figure 8.l). The Orientalist imaginary was more than scenography here. This was a city in which nothing was as it seemed, where deceit and danger threatened at every turn.67 And yet all of these hidden traps could be revealed - the Orientalist veil lifted - as they were in the print edition by the bright circle suggesting the powerful effects of night-vision goggles and in the interactive version on the web by rolling the mouse over the designated numbers. The American public was thus reassured that Baghdad would not be another Vietnam. But there was the real risk of another Jenin. An Israeli military historian advised readers of the New York Times that Operation Defensive Shield provided "a good model. for military tactics" in Iraq. The Pentagon evid­ ently agreed. The US Marine Corps had studied Israeli military tactics in the fall, just months after the IDF's ferocious assault on Palestinian towns and refugee camps in the West Bank, and officers had visited a mock-Arab town inside a military base in the Negev to see at first hand how Israeli troops learned to move from house to house by knocking holes through connecting walls, and how armored bulldozers were used to open up lines of sight and advance.68 But there were other, less overtly physical ways to render the opaque spaces of Arab cities transparent to American armed forces. "Intelligence will be crucial," Time reported, and plans of the city's infrastructure and satellite photographs would bring the multiple geome­ tries of the city into clear view. "The reason cities have been so militar­ ily formidable has been that it is so hard to know where things are," Baker explained, and "in a battle, the side that knows the most about where things are has a huge advantage - particularly if that knowledge is comprehen­ sive." That was precisely what gave the United States the advantage. For cities are systems - collections of objects, remember - in which "the build­ ings, streets, sewers, water lines, gas lines, telephone lines and electricity lines - all the things that distinguish a city - are tied together." It would be possible for American troops to see the fractured, fr�gmented city as a totality, Baker explained, because "there is more information about a given city block of Baghdad than for almost any other similar-sized area of non urban terrain."

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The locations of buildings, sewers and telephone lines that have made urban terrain so formidable are recorded in blueprints, maps, maintenance records, photographs, directories, and scale models. And the US Geographical Information Systems - which combine traditional location information of recorded plans with up-to-date, highly precise radar-generated digital terrain­ elevation data and other measurements - have grown dramatically over the past decade . . . . That's what offsets the street smarts of someone who has intimate knowledge of a room, building or neighborhood. If the last battle is in Baghdad, the US will enter it knowing more about the terrain than the Iraqis dO.69

Once American troops were in the urban battle space they would also be able to see its configurations more clearly than Iraqi troops. The press made much of UAVs - Predator drones, and especially tiny drones such as the Dragon Eye that fit into a backpack - that could transmit high-resolution, real-time images that would enable American commanders to "tell their officers on the street where Iraqi soldiers and Fedayeen guerrillas are hid­ ing - which rooftops they're crouched on, which windows they've been firing from, which alleyways are clear and which are deathtraps." This too was a lesson from Israeli military operations in Gaza and the West Bank. Cities reduce the effectiveness of many remote technologies, "com­ pressing combat space and decision-making time-lines," but the left-hand pane of the Time graphic showed that American ground troops would have the advantage of "specially designed urban-combat gear" including thermal­ imaging and night-vision goggles (so that they would "own the night," as one reporter put it) and GPS trackers and intranets "to help troops navigate the inner-city labyrinth." And the use of laser- and GPS-guided "smart bombs" would supposedly permit American forces to pinpoint their concealed targets with deadly accuracy.70 It never turned out quite that way. Most Iraqi cities were pounded by airstrikes before the ground troops swept in. The aim, according to Ahmad, was to turn Baghdad into "a city of corpses and ghosts" expressly to spare American troops the nightmare of urban combat.71 Ahmad's imagery may be questioned - attempts were made to minimize civilian casu­ alties - but the "pinpoint accuracy" of the strikes was equally question­ able.72 And once troops entered the city, the battle space turned out to be far from transparent. When the armored columns of the 3rd Infantry Division launched their "Thunder Run" through Baghdad in the first week of April, for example, their military maps had no civilian markings so that the tanks were reduced to following highway direction signs and made

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one wrong turn after another. High-level visuals were no better: "Satellite imagery didn't show bunkers or camouflaged armor and artillery," and field commanders had access to just one unmanned drone whose cameras "weren't providing much either."73 In the months that followed, guerrilla warfare started against the occupying forces and their technological super­ iority counted for very little in the cities. The streets were transparent to Iraqis but still stubbornly opaque to American troops: "The daily attacks that use the urban landscape for concealment and flight have frustrated and frightened US forces in Baghdad. ,,74 As these media reports showed, it was not just American armed forces who sought to peer into the opaque spaces of Iraqi cities. As the president of MSNBC put it, since the first Gulf War "the technology - the military's and the media's - has exploded." What he didn't say is that technologies had also become increasingly interchangeable. Media commentators described the Pentagon as "more creative" and "more imaginative" than it had been in the first Gulf War - "this may be the one time where the sequel is more compelling than the original" - and studio sets in their turn mimicked the military'S command-and-control centers. The computer­ generated graphics used by television news programs were created by the same satellite firms and defense industries that supplied the military. In the print media there were endless satellite photographs and maps too and, on media websites, interactive graphics - to make these spaces trans­ parent to viewers. Newspapers provided daily satellite maps of Baghdad as a city of targets (figure 8 .2). On the web, USA Today's interactive map of "Downtown Baghdad" invited its users: "Get a satellite-eye's view of Baghdad. Strategic sites and bombing targets are marked, but you can click on any quadrant for a close-up." The site also included imagery of the targets "before" and "after" the air strikes. The Washington Post's inter­ actives invited the viewer to "roll ove� the numbers to see what targets were hit on which day; click to read more about the targets. ,, 75 It wasn't just that, through these means, the war in Iraq was presented as "the ultimate in reality television," as Michiko Kakutani has it, because the inter­ activity of these images on the web added another dimension. Their visu­ ality was produced through the conjunction of sight and touch, eye and hand, the interface of screen and mouse, and this made it possible for the viewer to intervene and make the spaces transparent - to repeat the mil­ itary reduction of the city to a series of targets, and so become complicit in its destruction - and yet at the same time to refuse the intimacy of cor­ poreal engagement.76

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Known bombing targets

1 . Iraq air force headquarters 2. Central railroad station 3. TV centre 4. Ministry of Information 5. Ministry of Planning 6. Ministry of Industry and Military Industrialization 7. Council of Ministers

C] Presidential complex 8. Special Security headquarters 9. AI Salam Palace 1 0. AI Sijood Presidential Palace (Hussein's official residence) 1 1 . Baath Party headquarters 1 2. Baath Party Military Command headquarters 1 3. Republican Palace 1 4. 5th Battalion Special Republican Guard

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These effects were reinforced by a studied refusal to count - or even estimate - Iraqi casualties. The "kills" counted by coalition forces (for public consumption at any rate) were tanks, artillery, missile launchers objects - not people. "We do not look at combat as a scorecard," the chief military spokesman at CENTCOM told the New York Times. "We are not going to ask battlefield commanders to make specific reports on enemy casualties." This is a strange claim to make, since the effective conduct of war evidently requires an assessment of the losses suffered by the enemy.77 In fact some commanders estimated that 2,000-3,000 Iraqi fighters were killed during the first ground assault on Baghdad alone, and another report put the total number of Iraqi military casualties anywhere between 13,500 and 45,000.78 Whatever the correct figure, the contrast with coalition casu­ alties could not be plainer. These were much lower, precisely accounted for, and - significantly - linked to their families at home. Here is novelist Julian Barnes: The return of British bodies has been given full-scale TV coverage. . . . It thuds on the emotions. But Iraqi soldiers? They're just dead. The Guardian told us in useful detail how the British Army breaks bad news to families. What happens in Iraq? Who tells whom? Does news even get through? Do you just wait for your 1 8 year-old conscript son to come home or not to come home? Do you get the few bits that remain after he has been pulverized by our bold new armaments? There aren't many equivalencies around in this war, but you can be sure that the equivalence of grief exists.79

For American and British viewers, their troops had families and friends but Iraqi troops were without these affiliations. Cut free from the ties that bound them to others, they disappeared - neither bodies nor even numbers - but, as Barnes said, just dead. The principle that if they had not been counted they did not count applied with equal force to civilian casualties. Colin Powell repeated the indiffer­ ence he had shown during the first Gulf War: "We really don't know how many civilian deaths there have been, and we don't know how many of them can be attributed to coalition action, as opposed to action on the part of Iraqi armed forces as they defended themselves. "so But the Pentagon must have had some idea because it made its own estimates in advance. Rumsfeld required all plans for air attacks likely to kill more than 30 civilians to be submitted to him for approval. Over 50 submissions were made; all of them were approved. None of the numbers were released. All estimates of casualties are bound to be contentious and, in the teeth of lives

Figure 8.2

Targeting Baghdad (Courtesy of Digital Global, after Los Angeles

Times, March 29, 2003)

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official opposition, are shot through with difficulties.81 But there are some markers. A detailed examination of the records of 27 hospitals in Baghdad and the surrounding districts concluded that at least 1 ,700 Iraqi civilians had died and more than 8,000 were injured in the battle for the capital alone. Hundreds, even thousands of other deaths were undocumented, their bodies lying under tons of rubble, buried in makeshift graves all over the city, or marked only by scraps of black card fluttering on walls and doors.82 The most systematic and scrupulous accounting concluded that 6,0877,798 civilians had been killed and at least 20,000 injured ( 8,000 of them in Baghdad alone) between January 1 and August 1 , 2003,.83 The Pentagon's war without bodies was in stark contrast to the war seen by the Arab world. Arabic newspapers and news channels showed the bloody victims of Operation Iraqi Freedom, and the overwhelming grief of ordinary families who had been caught up in the violence of the war. These images had a terrifying impact on Iraqis waiting for the fighting to reach them. Here is Salam Pax writing from Baghdad:

of view and lines of sight. To Muslim viewers these scenes had a far more intense corporeality than substituting bodies for targets might seem to imply. In a brilliantly perceptive essay Jonathan Raban linked the sense of bodily assault and injury conveyed by images like these to the corporeality of Islam itself. Throughout the nineteenth century European Orienta lists such as Edward Lane had marveled at the choreography of Islam's profession of faith, the intricate sequence of bodily gestures and movements repeated by Muslims all over the world as they face Mecca and pray five times a day.86 Raban realized that the physical character of this prayer is unique to Islam, but he also recognized its extraordinary significance for the con­ stitution of Islam as a political and cultural communion. As the world turns, he wrote, "the entire ummah [the global community of Muslims] goes down on its knees in a never-ending wave of synchronised prayer," and this endows the ummah "a body literally made up of bodies" - with "a corporeal substance" that is utterly unlike "the airy, arbitrary, dissolving and re­ constituting nations of Arabia." The space of the ummah is not empty, abstract, hollowed out; it has a palpable fleshiness, filled with and con­ stituted through interconnected bodies whose affiliations cannot be sundered by the geometries of colonial power. Raban explained that this orchestrated performance of space, and the connectivities that are produced and validated through it, means that it is by no means "a far-fetched thought in the Islamic world" to see "the invasion of Iraq as a brutal assault on the ummah, and therefore on one's own person." On the contrary,

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Today's (and last night's) shock attacks didn't come from airplanes but rather from the airwaves. The images al-Jazeera is broadcasting are beyond any description . . . . What was most disturbing [were] the images of civilian casu­ alties from the hospitals [in Basra]. They are simply not prepared to deal with these things. People were lying on the floor with bandages and blood all over. If this is what " urban warfare" is going to look like we're in for a disaster. 84

The same images reverberated around the rest of the Arab world. There were five Arabic all-news channels, but al-Jazeera led the field in both the quality of its reporting and its independence. Proceeding on the reason­ able belief that the war was illegal, al-Jazeera consistently referred to American and British troops as "invading forces," and did not shrink from broadcasting what one of its senior editors described as "the horror of the bombing campaign, the blown-out brains, the blood-spattered pave­ ments, the screaming infants and the corpses." In the eyes of the Pentagon al-Jazeera was "cinematic agitprop against American Central Command's Hollywood news producers," and on several occasions coalition forces took offensive action against its offices and staff, and against other so-called "unilateral" journalists who were supposedly reporting "from the enemy side. ,,85 But the images shown by the Arabic media to their various audiences did much more than counter the Defense Department's preferred points

-

" Geographical distance from the site of the invasion hardly seems to dull the impact of this bodily assault. It's no wonder the call of the ummah

effortlessly transcends the flimsy national boundaries of the Middle East - those lines of colonial convenience, drawn in the sand by the British and the French 80 years ago." This way of seeing - and being in - the world involves a radically different conception of the self to the autonomous individual constructed under the sign of European modernity. Within the cultures of Islam, as Lawrence Rosen has shown with exemplary clarity, "the self is not an artifact of interior construction but an unavoidably pub­ lic act." The consequences of all this are, as Raban emphasized, literally far-reaching: We're dealing here with a world in which a commitment to, say, Palestine, or to the people of Iraq, can be a defining constituent of the self in a way that westerners don't easily understand. The recent demonstrations against the US and Britain on the streets of Cairo, Amman, Sanaa and Islamabad may

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look deceptively like their counterparts in Athens, Hamburg, London and New York, but their content is importantly different. What they register is not the vicarious outrage of the anti-war protests in the west but a sense of intense personal injury and affront, a violation of the self. Next time, look closely at the faces on the screen: if their expressions appear to be those of people seen in the act of being raped, or stabbed, that is perhaps closer than ; we can imagine to how they actually feel. 87

through the crowds - mainly women and children - and through the cheap brick walls of local homes, amputating limbs and heads." By the following day, at least 60 people had died; scores more were left with excruciating injuries. The immediate response from American and British sources was to suggest that the attack was the result of a malfunctioning Iraqi missile ("many have fallen back on Baghdad"). But an old man whose home was close to the crater retrieved a metal fragment minutes after the explosion. It was marked with a serial and a lot number, which enabled it to be traced to a HARM cruise missile (HARM stands for High-speed Anti-Radiation Missile, but the acronym is more accurate) whose warhead is designed to explode into thousands of aluminum fragments; it was manufactured by the Texas-based company Ray-theon, "the world's largest producer of 'smart' armaments," and sold to the procurement arm of the US navy. The re­ sponse to these revelations, from Britain's Defence Secretary Geoffrey Hoon, was to claim that the fragment had been moved from elsewhere in the city and planted to discredit coalition forces. "We have very clear evidence imme­ diately after those two explosions there were representatives of the regime clearing up in and around the market place," he said. "Now why they should be doing that other than to perhaps disguise their own respons­ ibility for what took place is an interesting question." Presumably had their roles been reversed Mr Hoon's own reaction would not have been to see what he could do to help but instead to nip down to the East End with a fragment of Iraqi missile and find a senior citizen willing to foist it into the arms of a gullible journalist. An inquiry into the attack was promised - in fact, reporters were assured that it was ongoing - but this was a lie: several months later it was revealed that there had never been an inquiry.90 On April 7 four 2,000 Ib satellite-guided "bunker-buster" bombs were dropped on the Baghdad suburb of Mansur. The target was the al-Sa'ah, a cheap restaurant where American intelligence believed Saddam and two of his sons were meeting with their aides. The "smart bombs" missed their target and instead destroyed four or five houses, pulverizing their inhab­ itants into "pink mist."

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There were also non-Muslim journalists, particularly the 2,000 "uni­ lateral" ones disembodied from the coalition forces, whose reports brought home the horror of the attacks and the suffering of individuals and fam­ ilies. Suzanne Goldenberg went to an improvised mortuary in a Baghdad hospital and her account - the most awful still life I can imagine - has a visceral corporeality that continues to haunt me: Death's embrace gave the bodies intimacies they never knew in life. Strangers, bloodied and blackened, wrapped their arms around others, hugging them close. A man's hand rose disembodied from the bottom of the heap of corpses to rest on the belly of a man near the top. A blue stone in his ring glinted as an Iraqi orderly opened the door of the morgue, admitting daylight and the sound of a man's sobs to the cold silence within . . . . These were mere fragments in a larger picture of killing, flight and destruction inflicted on a sprawling city of 5 million. And it grew more unbearable by the minute.88

Until that pulverizing assault, Baghdad had seemed almost surreal. Fixed cameras transmitted the same endless pictures of near-empty streets in the central districts, traffic lights moving through their sequence time and time again. War, as Goldenberg put it, "arrived as a series of interruptions to daily life." But behind the scenes, in the outlying districts and as the war advanced, an altogether different story was unfolding. Reporters described scenes of incandescent horror: mutilated bodies, screaming children, and overworked doctors in ill-equipped hospitals performing operations using aspirin instead of anaesthetic. 89 On occasion, media reports obliged the coalition forces and the distant governments that stood behind them to account for the consequences of their actions. I have space for only two examples. In the early evening of March 28 a missile struck the ai-Naser market in the al-Shula district in north Baghdad, a poor Shi'a neighborhood of single-story corrugated iron and cement stores, tents, and two-room houses. The market was crowded with women, children, and the elderly. "The missile sprayed hunks of metal

The smouldering crater is littered with the artifacts of ordinary middle-class life - a crunched Passat sedan, a charred stove, a wrought-iron front gate, a broken bedhead and the armrest of a chair upholstered in green-brocade. The top floors of surrounding buildings are sheared off. Mud thrown by the force of the blast cakes what is left of those buildings. Nearby date palms

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are decapitated. Bulldozers and rescue crews work frantically, p�eling back the rubble in the hope of finding survivors. Neighbours and relatives of the home-owners weep in the street, some embracing to ease the pain; all of them wondering why such a powerful missile was dumped on them after the US said its heavy bombing campaign was over.91

as "a conflict within each of us between compassion and enmity" . . . . From this sense of overlap . . . are born ideas of restraint and immunity in war that have always existed alongside more powerful and competing ideas of justifiable hatred and extreme violence. From these ideas comes the person of the civilian.96

Black banners draped across the rubble mourned the deaths of family mem­ bers. Yet when doubts were raised about whether Saddam had been in the restaurant at all a Defense Department spokeswoman said she didn't think "it matters very much. I'm not losing sleep trying to figure out if he was in there. ,, 92 One might assume that these reactions were untypical. But one might also see them as the products not only of a culture of military violence but also of a political culture of denial and dismissal, which treats its civil­ ian victims not even as "collateral damage" - objects and obstacles who got in the way - but as irrelevancies. No regret, no remorse: just more homines sacri. They simply didn't matter. These victims were people who had been excluded from politically qualified life by Saddam, but reactions like these showed that they were excluded from politically qualified life by America and Britain too: ultimately, excluded from life altogether.93 The only Iraqi bodies that were acknowledged by the coalition were those that could be turned to iconic account. On one side, the dead bodies of Saddam's two sons, Uday and Qusay, were exhibited to show that the appar­ atus of terror in which were central parts was itself being dismembered. The ordinary dead - thousands of them - were disavowed.94 On another side, the maimed body of little Ali Abbas, the beautiful 1 1-year-old boy whose arms were blown off in the bombing of Baghdad, was made to stand for - and also, horribly, to stand in the way of - countless other innocent victims. At times, it seemed as if he was "the only tragedy of collateral damage this war had produced. " The press made Ali's story revolve around the compassion of their readers, not the military violence that had killed so many others and nearly destroyed his own life.95 Those who shrug their shoulders and think all this inevitable and, on the scale of things, hardly worth bothering about, should reflect on an argument advanced by Hugo Slim:

For the most part, it was only when the bombing, fighting, and killing were supposed to be over that Iraq's ordinary inhabitants were recognized. Even when Baghdad was deemed to have fallen to American troops on April 9, the trauma of "liberation" was airbrushed away. Here is one young Iraqi woman, "Riverbend," describing the scene in her weblog:

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Enemies are not just enemies. Enemies never stop being human beings. They are still people. Their lives are precious. They are like us. Indeed, we are the enemies of others. This overlap emerges from what Susan Niditch describes

For me, April 9 was a blur of faces distorted with fear, horror and tears. All over Baghdad you could hear shelling, explosions, clashes, fighter planes, the dreaded Apaches and the horrifying tanks tearing down streets and high­ ways. Whether you loved Saddam or hated him, Baghdad tore you to pieces. Baghdad was burning. Baghdad was exploding . . . . Baghdad was falling . . . it was a nightmare beyond anyone's power to describe. Baghdad was up in smoke that day, explosions everywhere, American troops crawling all over the city, fires, looting, fighting and killing. Civilians were being evacuated from one area to another, houses were being shot at by tanks, cars were being burned by Apache helicopters. . . . Baghdad was full of death and destruction on April 9. Seeing tanks in your city, under any circum­ stances, is perturbing. Seeing foreign tanks in your capital is devastating.97

But scenes like these had no place in the liberation scenario. Ordinary Iraqis could only be allowed into the frame once they had appeared in the streets with the requisite display of jubilation. As journalist Mark Steel put it, "Iraqis only count if they're dancing in the street. ,,98 Suddenly Baghdad was no longer a collection of targets - a city of objects - and a new series of graphics and interactives appeared showing "Baghdad neighborhoods." These, it turned out, were not the exclusive preserve of tyrants and ter­ rorists but of millions of ordinary men, women, and children. The New York Times provided summary profiles of Saddam City ("a sprawling densely populated slum that is home to as many as two million Shi'ites"), Kadhimiya ("an old middle-class Shi'ite neighborhood"), Karada ("a residential district of two and three-storey buildings"), and Mansour, Mamoun and Yarmuk ("newer and more upscale neighborhoods of less densely spaced one-storey houses and walled gardens"). Time presented a new map too, "Inside Baghdad," which described "a modern, sprawling

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urban center surrounded by dense, diverse neighborhoods" like Saddam City ("a sprawling, dense urban slum of one- and two-storey concrete build­ ings that house millions of poor Shi'ite Muslims," many of whom "come from rural areas and continue to raise their livestock near their small apart­ ments)," Amiryah ("a wealthy, upscale district, home to doctors, profes­ sionals and government apparatchiks" where "houses tend to be newer and more spacious"), and Khalimiya (Kadhimiya; "a middle class Shi'ite neighborhood, where residents dress more traditionally arid mosques and religious iconography are prevalent"). The juxtaposition of two small maps on the margin showed that Baghdad was about the same size as Columbus, Ohio, but with a pre-war population roughly seven times as large (figure 8.3). The Los Angeles Times made similar comparisons on its map. The distance from Baghdad's airport to the center of the city, for example, was "roughly the distance from downtown LA to Pasadena." For a brief moment, at least, Baghdad was a city almost like any other: no longer opaque, alien, hollowed out but peopled.99 On May 1 , when he announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq, Bush told his American audience that "When Iraqi civilians looked into the faces of our servicemen and women, they saw strength and kind­ ness and good will." No doubt many of them were men and women who displayed all these qualities. But how could the Iraqi people not also have seen in their faces a regime that had bombed and starved their families and friends for 12 years? An army that had fought its way into their cities with terror at its head and death in its wake? An occupying force that demanded complete compliance with its will? "We are the oldest civilization, but we are presented to the world as terrorists," a primary school teacher in Baghdad told one human rights worker. "Only people who fight with small guns are called terrorists. Bush, who bombs us with cluster bombs and strangles us with the embargo, is a 'civilized man.' " You might quib­ ble over the details, but you can hardly miss her point. "Somehow when the bombs start dropping or you hear machine-guns at the end of your street," Salam Pax wrote in his weblog, "you don't think about ' your imminent 'liberation' any more."lOO The Cutting-Room War

If it is hard to write about the war in Iraq, it is no less difficult to write about the occupation. Several weeks before Bush declared major combat

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operations over, columnist Adrian Hamilton had already despaired at what he called "the obscenity of bickering over death and torture. " "The shaken inhabitants of Baghdad are being called on to stream out on the streets to prove the pro-war lobby right, to show that this was a war of liberation," he wrote, "while anti-war commentators have hung on to every sign of continued resistance as proof that war is a disaster." Hamilton cap­ tured the dialectics of the war with precision:

Bush's vainglorious rhetoric against him: "They are superpowers, they can do anything they want." He spoke for many others who denounced what they saw as American indifference as much as impotence. "They brought thousands of tanks to kill us," one Baghdad shopkeeper complained. "Why can't they bring in generators or people to fix the power plants? If they wanted to, they could." The dissonance between the powers to which Bush's rhetoric laid claim and the powers exercised by his forces on the ground was considerable. The anger, frustration, and disappointment of ordinary Iraqis spilled over into the streets and exposed the looking-glass fantasy of many of the pronouncements made by the Coalition Provisional Author­ ity from inside the vast Republican Palace once occupied by Saddam. 1 03 Secondly, Washington's scenario envisaged Iraq as an empty screen on which America could project its own image (with the aid of proxies returned from exile in the United States). "We dominate the scene," announced the US civilian administrator, L. Paul Bremer, "and we will impose our will on this country. ,, 104 And yet Iraqis are not extras in a silent movie - mute victims of Saddam, sanctions, and smart bombs - but educated people with their own ideas, capabilities, and agencies. They also know the long, bitter history of Anglo-American entanglement in Iraq (rather better than their American and British screenwriters), and they are perfectly capable of dis­ tinguishing between liberation and occupation. "Don't expect me to buy little American flags to welcome the new colonists," Salam Pax wrote, recall­ ing the British occupation from the First World War. "This is really just a bad remake of an even worse movie." As Mary Riddell tartly observed, "it was always implausible that a nation of fierce anti-colonialists would follow the Pentagon productions script. ,, 105 I want to consider each of these blind spots in turn, and show how the spaces they limned became super­ imposed in wars of resistance (the plural is deliberate) that the main par­ ties to the coalition were unable and unwilling to acknowledge: ordinary, everyday acts of defiance and, eventually, a complex and increasingly vicious guerrilla war against the occupation. When the arrival of American troops was not greeted with unbridled joy, Friedman was nonplussed: "We've gone from expecting applause to being relieved that there is no overt hostility." His explanation? The Iraqi people were "in a pre-political, primordial state of nature. For the moment, Saddam has been replaced by Hobbes, not Bush.,, 106 Few observers equaled Friedman's condescension, but many others thought the surge of looting that followed the collapse of the Iraqi regime was the understandable result of sheer material deprivation:

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For every mother mourning the loss of a relative who disappeared under Saddam's tyranny there is now one frantically searching and praying that her son was not one of those killed by the might of Western armour fight­ ing a poorly equipped, badly trained army. We can say what we like about what this proves or doesn't. But then we can afford to. It's not our coun­ try and we're not caught in the firing line.101

And so I try to proceed with caution. The war on Iraq was, as I have said, no film. But seeing it in those terms - for a moment - helps to explain why the occupation of Iraq turned so rapidly into such a nightmare. "The buildup to this war was so exhausting, the coverage of the dash to Baghdad so telegenic and the climax of the toppling of Saddam's statue so dramatic," Friedman suggested, "that everyone who went through it seems to prefer that the story end just there.,, 1 02 This isn't just a smart-ass remark. When Bush announced the end of major combat operations in Iraq, he did so in front of a huge banner proclaiming "Mission accomplished." Washington's script required the war to end not only in triumph but also in acclamation. Its very title - Operation Iraqi Freedom - proclaimed American victory as Iraqi liberation. Anything else was to become a series of out-takes, what Rumsfeld glibly called the "untidiness" left on the cutting-room floor. When Bush surrounded himself with the trappings of Hollywood to declare victory in "the Battle of Iraq," he projected America as superpower and superstar. This aestheticization of politics (and violence) played well with many in his domestic audience. Its space of constructed visibility had two blind spots, however, that worked to undermine the very scenario it sought to promote. First, it clearly suggested that the Superhero who had prevailed in the war would prevail afterwards. And yet in Iraq public order virtually collapsed, public services continued to be degraded and disrupted, and reconstruction faltered. As temperatures soared in the intense summer, one Iraqi, furious at the continuing shortages of electricity and water, turned

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With so many Iraqis living on the edge of starvation, it is hardly surprising that they took the one chance they had over the past week to loot .anything they could get their hands on. Over the past 12 years in Baghdad you would see men standing all day in open-air markets trying to sell a few cracked earthenware plates or some old clothes. They were the true victims of UN sanctions while Saddam Hussein could pay for gold fittings to the bathroom in his presidential palace. . . . Economic sanctions really did devastate Iraqi society . . . [and] it is [this] terrible poverty which has given such an edge to the fury of the mobs of looters which have raged through Iraqi cities in recent weeks.107

UN Human Rights Commission was visibly angry on both counts. He insisted that the war was legal, but he was equally adamant that it had not been established that the coalition was an occupying power.l 1O In fact, however, under the terms of the Hague Convention of 1907 and the Fourth Geneva Convention (1949), the laws of belligerent occupation come into effect "as soon as territory is 'occupied' by adversary forces, that is, when the government of the occupied territory is no longer capable of exercis­ ing its authority and the attacker is in a position to impose its control over that area." Occupation is a matter of fact - not of intention or declaration - and the United States army's own manual acknowledges "the primacy of fact as the test of whether or not occupation exists." In direct contra­ diction to claims made by the Bush administration, "the entire country need not be conquered before an occupation comes into effect as a matter of law, and a state of occupation need not formally be proclaimed . . . . That some resistance continues does not preclude the existence of occu­ pation provided the occupying force is capable of governing the territory with some degree of stability. ,, 111 Under the Hague and Geneva Conventions, occupying powers are responsible for restoring public order and preventing looting. "When an occupying power takes over another country's territory, it automatically becomes responsible for the protection of its civilians, their property and institutions," Fisk reported in April. "But the British and Americans have simply discarded this notion." Hence Rumsfeld's stunningly dismissive response to widespread looting: "Freedom's untidy. Stuff happens. Free people are free to make mistakes and commit crimes and do bad things. ,, 112 This freedom extended to his own troops. There were credible reports of American soldiers urging the looters on, and of others themselves involved in pillage and theft.1 1 3 When the International Crisis Group visited Baghdad in June its investigators were disturbed to find "a city [still] in distress, chaos and ferment." They described the protracted failure to establish civil order as "a reckless abdication of the occupying powers' obligation to protect the population." Even if the Bush administration sought to ignore the provisions of international law, the US army's own Field Manual is unequivocal. In the aftermath of war, it reads, the army "shall take all the measures in [its] power to restore, and ensure, as far as possible, public order and safety. ,, 114 And yet in post-war Iraq American troops had other priorities. Some examples.

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I am quite sure this is right. But no matter how wretched the situation of the people there are clearly defined legal responsibilities for public order and safety placed on an occupying power that cannot be set aside. Indeed, the worse the condition of the civilian population, one might expect the greater the onus on the occupying power to come to their aid. When this does not happen and the system of responsibilities is suspended then sovereign power has produced another space of the exception. In his (general) discussion of these matters, Giorgio Agamben suggested that the two situations envisaged by Friedman, far from being polar opposites, are intimately connected. "The state of nature and the state of exception are nothing but two sides of a single topological process," he argued, "in which what was presupposed as external (the state of nature) now reappears, as in a Mobius strip or a Leyden jar, in the inside (as state of exception). ,,108 The two sides cannot be held apart by claiming that troops who have fought a war are unable to secure the peace - that "they had orders to kill people, but not to protect them" 109 - because the laws of belligerent occupation are clearly established and, for that matter, clearly understood. Perhaps it was for that very reason that the coalition prevaricated. In the run-up to the war, the Pentagon consistently told relief organizations that US troops would be "liberators" not occupiers, so that those laws would not apply. Like his masters in Washington, General Tommy Franks repeatedly insisted that the war in Iraq was "about liberation not occu­ pation," and in mid-April his deputy operations director at CENTCOM declared that the United States did not consider itself an occupying power but a "liberating force." One week later, UN General Secretary Kofi Annan, noting that the United States and Britain had gone to war with­ out the authorization of the Security Council, called on the coalition to respect international law as the occupying power. The US envoy to the

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After the capitulation of the northern city of Mosul - scene of some of the most frantic looting and destruction yesterday - a reported 2,000 American troops were deployed to secure the northern oilfields, bringing all of Iraq's oil reserves, the second largest in the world, under American and British pro­ tection. But American commanders in the field said they did not have the manpower, or the orders from above, to control the scenes on the streets of Baghdad and other cities.115

prisoners of war (and therefore protected by the Geneva Conventions). The others were denied legal advice or the right to contact their families. Most of them were held at Camp Cropper, a makeshift canvas prison edged with razor wire, hastily constructed by American troops at Baghdad International Airport. The regime there recalled those at Bagram and Guanranamo Bay. In�ates described the prison as being "fit only for animals." They alleged that the detainees were subjected to beatings, sleep deprivation, and hooding, and that they were punished by being made to kneel or lie on the ground, face down and hands tied, in temperatures of 50 degrees or more. "What they're doing is completely illegal," one Red Cross official confided to a reporter, "and they know it. ,, 121 As in Afghanistan, the overwhelming thrust of continuing offensive operations was directed against America's political opponents and its military or paramilitary enemies - looters and criminals were low in the order of priorities - and coalition actions were bent on establishing order rather than the rule of law. Instead of being indivisible, the one a foundation for the other, the former consistently overrode the latter. Responsibility for the provision of essential services to the civilian populatio� is no less clearly established by international law. The Geneva Convention requires the occupying power to ensure "to the fullest extent of the means available to it" that the population receives adequate food, water and medical treatment; that power supplies, water and sewage sys­ tems are restored and safeguarded; and that proper public health and hygiene measures are in place.122 The United States military is not unfamiliar with these obligations either. Its Doctrine for Joint Urban Operations recog­ nizes the vital importance of "consequence management." "Because urban areas contain the potential for significant noncombatant suffering and physical destruction, urban operations can involve complex and poten­ tially critical legal questions," it warns, and commanders in the field must be made aware of the importance of "information operations, populace and resources control, health service and logistic support, civil-military operations, and foreign humanitarian assistance. ,, 123 And yet in post-war Iraq there was a considerable gap between rhetoric and reality. Dualities are a desperate fact of life in colonial societies - Fanon spoke of "a world cut in two" - but, in a country where the occupiers constantly deny the press of their occupation, those divisions have a way of becoming unusually sharp-edged.124 At the end of April, for example, the US army claimed that 60 percent of Baghdad's water and power supplies were already back in operation and that full service would be

In what journalist James Meek called the "scurrying, burning, breaking madness of Baghdad," looters sacked almost every government ministry. But there were two exceptions, which were ringed by hundreds of Amer­ ican troops. These were the Ministry of the Interior and the Ministry of Oil.l16 American soldiers were detailed to chip away at a large mural on the floor of the aI-Rashid hotel's lobby showing former President George H. W. Bush and the legend "BUSH IS CRIMINAL." But apparently "none could be spared to protect the treasures in the National Museum while they were being looted up the road at the same time.,,117 Examples like these can be multiplied many times over, and they lead to a deeply dis­ turbing conclusion. If parts of Iraq were reduced to a "state of nature" "a society of either predators or prey," as Ed Vulliamy put itl 1 8 - this cannot be attributed to the "pre-political" (read "primitive," "savage") instincts of the people of Iraq. On the contrary, most of them were clearly distressed at what they witnessed. Here is Salam Pax writing from Baghdad on April 10: "To see your city destroyed before your own eyes is not a pain that can be described or put to words. It turns you sour or was that bitter, it makes something snap in you and you lose whatever hope you had. Undone by your own hands." But then he adds: "What I am sure of is that this could have been stopped at a snap of an American finger." [ [9 The comment is immensely significant. The degradation of Iraq's towns and cities - the reduction of its civil society - was not an eter�al "state of nature" at all: it was produced as the space of the exception. In Friedman's shorthand, "Bush" begat "Hobbes." When reporter Euan Ferguson wrote that "Baghdad has . turned into Afghanistan faster than Afghanistan," he was referring to its descent into a particular kind of lawlessness: looting, robbery, gunfights, · and violent attacks on the civilian population.120 But there was another kind of law­ lessness, and other signs of the space of the exception familiar from the war in Afghanistan soon appeared. By August more than 5,000 Iraqis were held in American custody, but only 500 of them were deemed to be _

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restored within a week or two. But most Baghdad residents were living in a different city: They reported prolonged blackouts, with power returned sporadically and not necessarily at convenient times (for example, in the middle of the night) and insufficient to keep food refrigerated, houses cooled and tempers under control. . . . Breakdowns in one part of the infrastructure can lead to dis­ ruptions or even collapse of other parts, with the impact rippling through a society already weakened by more than twelve years of debilitating inter­ national sanctions. The lengthy power shortage has affected water and sewage pumping stations, the refrigeration of medicines, the operation of labora­ tories (involved, for example, in testing for water-borne diseases), and even the production of oil, itself necessary to fuel the power plants. Piped water has been reaching Baghdad homes most of the time (though pressure is low in many areas) but only 37 percent of water pumped from rivers is being treated, increasing the risk of diarrhoea, cholera and typhoid. . . . The rivers them­ selves are the repositories of tons of raw sewage, untreated as long as treat­ ment stations remain idle due to lack of electricity and essential repairs.12s

By August, more than three months after Bush declared his victory, the situation was still acute. Baghdad is built on a floodplain and the terrain is flat, so water and sewage have to be pumped throughout the city. While most of the main pumping stations had been repaired by then, none of the sewage-treatment plants were working and so sewage was still being pumped straight into the river. Some sewers had collapsed completely either through bomb damage or by tanks being driven over them - and when the pressure in the pipe built up, sewage rose to the surface through the drains. "Many of the capital's streets are flooded with untreated sewage water," according to the UN Office for the Coordination of Humanitar­ ian Affairs. "In the city'S famous Jamilah Market, boys wearing sandals pull carts through several inches of polluted water, which laps beneath food stalls at the side of the street." Diseases linked to contaminated water had already doubled - diarrhea, dysentery, cholera, and typhoid - and chil­ dren were particularly vulnerable.126 Rajiv Chandrasekaran reported that the persistent blackouts - 1 6 hours or more at a time - had "transformed a city that was once regarded as the most advanced in the Arab world to a place of pre-industrial privation. ,,127 Just as attempts had been made to shift the burden of responsibility for the war's civilian casualties onto the Iraqis themselves, so these infrastructural problems were now blamed on Saddam and on post-war sabotage carried out by Saddam loyalists. "When

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you have 35 years of economic and political mismanagement," Bremer­ airily announced, "you can't fix those problems in three weeks or three months."128 Perhaps Iraqis did assume that things could be fixed too quickly; but they had little difficulty in tracing the problems back to American action or inaction. Iraq's power stations never recovered much more than half the operating capacity they had before the first Gulf War. They were de­ graded by the US-led sanctions regime for more than a decade; spare parts were in short supply and maintenance was pared back. Before the second war four-hour blackouts had been part of daily life in Baghdad, and they were much longer in other towns and cities because the government shielded the capital by diverting energy supplies from other parts of the country. The new war greatly exacerbated the gravity of the situation, when the US-led assault damaged many pylons and transmission lines. After the war, other facilities were wrecked by the looting that US troops failed to check: power stations were sacked and more transmission lines torn down and stripped of their copper covering. Iraqis knew very well that electricity was the key to their infrastructure, but they simply did not believe that the Americans understood its elemental importance for the rehabili­ tation of their everyday lives. Salam Pax reported that the most frequent question on people's lips was: "They did the destroying, why can't they repair them?"129 His own question was even more astute. "I keep won­ dering what happened to the months of 'preparation' for a post-Saddam Iraq," he wrote in his weblog. "Why is every single issue treated like they have never thought it would come up?" I 30 Paul Krugman's answer was simple and symmetric. Just as the Bush administration's determination to see what it wanted to see led to "a gross exaggeration of the threat Iraq posed before the war," so the same selec­ tive vision led to "a severe underestimation of the problems of post-war occupation." This shortcoming was compounded by a tussle between the State Department and the Department of Defense. The State Department had been drafting strategies for a post-war Iraq since April 2002, and its officials had repeatedly warned that reconstruction would present major challenges. But when Bush granted authority over reconstruction to the Pentagon, the Defense Department and its Office of Special Plans "all but ignored State and its working groups." Attention to post-war planning was at best "haphazard and incomplete" precisely because the script drawn up by Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz called for liberation not occupation.13 I Whatever the reason, however, the anger of most Iraqis was aroused by far more than the failure of the American and British forces to maintain

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public order and to restore electricity and water supplies. These were sharp provocations, to be sure, but most Iraqis were profoundly angered abused and humiliated - by the very presence of an occupying army. Historian Avi Shlaim, who was born in Baghdad, reminded British readers that in Iraq's collective memory Britain and the United States were "any­ thing but benign. " "The inglorious history of Western involvement in Iraq goes a long way to explaining why the Iraqi people are not playing their part in our script for the liberation of their country." 132 Comparisons were increasingly made with other colonial occupations. Some commentators looked to the colonial past. Stanley Kurtz proposed British India as a model for the Anglo-American undertaking, which was exactly what Britain's own colonial administration in Iraq had attempted with such spectacularly unsuc­ cessful results. 1 33 Others had a surer grasp of the dangers. Paul Kennedy saw Britain's moment in the Middle East as providing not an exemplary but a cautionary lesson. When he called the roll, his point was unmiss­ able: "Clive in India, Kitchener in the Sudan . . . Garner in Iraq." True to form, when former Lieutenant General Jay Garner arrived to take up his post as America's first civilian administrator of occupied Iraq, he lost no time in declaring how difficult it was "to take people out of darkness and lead them into light," in perfect mimicry of the colonial mandate of the early twentieth century. "To think we had imagined such abuses gone for­ ever," wrote an exasperated Ignacio Ramonet, "civilising people seen as incapable of running their lives in the difficult conditions of the modern world." 1 34 Others looked to the colonial present in Afghanistan and Palestine for equally salutary lessons. Here is Seumas Milne writing on April 10: On the streets of Baghdad yesterday, it was Kabul, November 2001, all over again. Then, enthusiasts for the war on terror were in triumphalist mood . . . . Seventeen months later, such confidence looks grimly ironic. For most Afghans, "liberation" has meant the return of rival warlords, harsh repres­ sion, rampant lawlessness, widespread torture and Taliban-style policing of women. Meanwhile, guerrilla attacks are mounting on US troops . . . . Afghanistan is not of course Iraq, though it is a salutary lesson to those who believe the overthrow of recalcitrant regimes is the way to defeat anti­ western terrorism. It would nevertheless be a mistake to confuse the current mood in Iraqi cities with enthusiasm for the foreign occupation now being imposed. Even Israel's invading troops were feted by south Lebanese Shi'ites in 1982 only to be driven out by the Shi'ite Hizbullah resistance 18 years later.13s -

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These were prophetic observations. Two weeks later Phil Reeves reported that many Iraqis already saw the occupation as "the Palestinisation of Iraq," and responded by throwing stones at troops, a highly symbolic gesture in the Middle East where it is widely seen "as a heroic form of resistance to an illegal occupying force." And, as he subsequently emphasized, "having watched daily TV installments of the fate of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza, [Iraqis] recoil with particularly strong distaste at the concept of occupation." Later he witnessed the funeral of a man shot by American troops in Baghdad, where the mourners were overcome with grief and anger. It was, he wrote, a scene "commonplace in Gaza or the West Bank after a 36-year occupation in which thousands have been shot dead by the Israeli army." But, he added, "we were in Baghdad only a month after the Americans had routed one of the most repressive and corrupt regimes of the modern age.,,136 As the occupation wore on, the excessive use of force by coalition troops against the civilian population increased rather than diminished. The US army's own Manual FH3-06.1 l instructs troops that "armed force is the last resort" and that civilians must be treated "with respect and dignity," but in many cases these injunctions were honored in the breach (or breech). "When in doubt," one trio of journalists observed, "GIs, often young, ex­ hausted and overstressed in the searing heat, have a tendency to shoot first and ask questions afterwards." The heavy burden placed on these front­ line soldiers - many of them young reservists - should not to be minimized. Many of them were clearly traumatized by what they had experienced; their nervousness is understandable, and the sacrifice of their lives is tragic. They were not there by choice, and their actions were scripted and under­ written by their political masters, who had assured them they would be greeted as liberators. No wonder they were shocked. It is an axiom of the movies projected by Bush and his associates that life is cheap, and on numerous occasions Iraqi civilians were dispatched without a flicker. The specter of homo sacer haunted Iraq as it did Afghanistan and Palestine. American troops repeatedly fired with deadly effect on unarmed de­ monstrators who were calling for an end to the occupation; civilians were seriously injured or killed when troops opened fire indiscriminately and without warning during raids on houses and markets; countless others were abused, beaten, and even killed at military checkpoints.137 Excuses were offered as explanations; apologies were rare, investigations perfunctory where they were conducted at all. These are all landmarks of occupation with which Arabs are agonizingly familiar. "Just like the Israeli occupation

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of the West Bank and Gaza," Fisk remarked, "the killing of civilians is never the fault of the occupiers. ,, 138 A common excuse was that actions by American troops were misunderstood. So, for example, Iraqis often com­ plained that troops on the roofs of buildings were using their binoculars and night-glasses to peer down into domestic courtyards where women were sitting or working; this caused grave offense because Islam has strict codes governing which men may and may not see Muslim women unveiled. When this provoked demonstrations and demands that the troops with­ draw from residential districts, the military replied that the Iraqis had "misread" the situation. The actions of the troops were entirely innocent: the men were merely engaged in routine surveillance of the neighborhood. But this assumes that the requirement to "read" properly - to understand different cultural traditions - applies only to Iraqis. And, as in the occupied territories of Palestine, the vast disparity in power between occupier and occupied compromises any mutual understanding that might be inscribed through a hermeneutic circle. The public space that opened up was filled in the first instance not by the coalition or by its civil administration but by the mosques. The United States and Britain "have ripped a big hole in Iraq," Freedland explained, and Shi'a Islam "is stepping through it." This was premature; the Shi'ites are in the majority but they do not speak with a single voice, and it was not long before factional and generational schisms surfaced. 139 Sunni Muslims were by no means passive either. Even so, in the immediate after­ math of the war the mosques addressed both the restoration of public order and public services and also the demand for self-determination. In many cases, their actions were decisive. In Baghdad's Saddam City - renamed Sadr City in honor of Grand Ayatollah Mohammed Sadiq al-Sadr of Najaf who had been assassinated on Saddam's orders in 1999 - clerics called for the looting to stop and for people who had stolen property to return it; if it was not claimed, it was to be handed to the Hawza, the Shi'a sem­ inary in Najaf where leading clerics teach. Young volunteers from the mosques set up armed checkpoints and patrolled the perimeters of the district's four hospitals to protect them against looting, and they also guarded Ministry of Health warehouses in al-Hurriya that supplied all the hospitals in Baghdad. The mosques also provided food, shelter, and money for the poor. "One cleric organized a team to drive two tankers to clear out water mains overflowing with sewage," Anthony Shadid re­ ported. "Another drove an ambulance through the city'S deserted streets at night, blaring appeals on its loudspeaker for municipal workers to return

to work." Clerics organized teams to restore electricity to the hospitals, paid the doctors, and shipped in more medical supplies from Najaf. They produced newspapers, and made plans for radio and television stations. By May green and black flags were fluttering over almost every other build­ ing in Sadr City. The scene was repeated in other districts in Baghdad and in cities further south like Basra, Karbala, and Najaf. "Sadr City may be the very model of the new Iraq that America is making," wrote Peter Beaumont. 140 These actions had tremendous political and ideological significance too. At overflowing Friday prayer services in April Iraqis heard calls for opposition to the occupation and support for the establishment of an Islamic state and the promulgation of Islamic law. In Baghdad, Nasiriyeh, and other towns, people spilled out on to the streets, calling for national unity and shouting slogans denouncing both Saddam and the continued occupation.141 "[The] clerics stand at the center of the most decisive moment for Shi'ite Muslims in Iraq's modern history," Shadid argued. "It is a revival from both the streets and the seminaries that will most likely shape the destiny of a postwar Iraq. In the streets, the end of Hussein's rule has unleashed a sweeping and boisterous celebration of faith, from Baghdad to Basra, as Shi'ites embrace traditions repressed for decades." 142 Among the most significant of those traditions was the pilgrimage to Karbala. Thousands of Muslims from all over southern Iraq converged on the holy city to mourn the death of Imman Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Mohammed, in a display that resonated with political as well as religious significance. Saddam had banned the pilgrimage since 1977 it was an unambiguous affirmation of the purity of Shi'a over Sunni Islam - but its resumption celebrated more than the end of his rule and the revival of Shi'a fortunes. "Now the Iraqi masses are taking to civic engagement and have begun to articulate political demands that reject occupation," one reporter observed. "Both Shi'a and Sunni religious leaders have emerged as voices for unity and as legitimising authorities for political action." At the close of the Karbala festival, the deputy leader of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq denounced the occupation and demanded that admin­ istration be turned over to "a national and independent government." Chants and banners reiterated the same theme: "No to Saddam, No to America, Yes to Islam." And some demonstrators already threatened a jihad against the occupiers. 143 It has been argued that the production of a sustained emergency the breakdown of public order and public services - was used by the

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coalition to justify its extraordinary actions and emergency powers and, indeed, its very presence in Iraq. What it could not do, however, was license the United States and Britain to embark on a program of wholesale re­ construction. In April the coalition held several meetings to establish an interim Iraqi administration (which was postponed in May). Many Iraqis viewed these gatherings with suspicion, regarding the former exiles invited to take part as carpetbaggers, mountebanks, and pawns of the Bush admin­ istration. "Looking at the names of some of the more dubious characters," Cockburn observed, "it may be that the real looting of Iraq is still to come." Exiles from the US-backed Iraqi Reconstitution and Development Council were also appointed as advisers to key Baghdad ministries. "It is an enor­ mously valuable asset to have people who share our values," US Deputy Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz explained, people "who also under­ stand what we're about as a country." 144 It could not have been put more plainly: what mattered was what the United States was "about." In part, the objective was to lay the foundations for a secular state. But there were other, less public, meetings to establish what one trio of journalists called "Iraq Inc." Decisions were taken to privatize Iraq's state industries and to award major contracts to American (mainly American) and British com­ panies. There was a brief spat between the principals (correct spelling) about the share of the spoils, which Mark Steel memorably likened to "a pair of undertakers burning down a house, then squabbling over who gets the job of making the coffins." As Naomi Klein objected,

The United States and Britain finally moved to regularize their actions through UN Security Council Resolution 1483, which was adopted on May 22, 2003. It gave the United States and Britain what the New York Times called "an international mandate" to administer post-war Iraq. The reso­ lution opened by reaffirming "the sovereignty and territorial integrity of Iraq" and stressing "the right of the Iraqi people freely to determine their own political future and control their own resources." This was largely gestural. The central provisions of the resolution not only recognized the United States and Britain as occupying powers but also constituted them as a "unified command" ("the Authority"). The Secretary-General was requested to appoint a special representative for Iraq, whose main tasks were to coordinate humanitarian and reconstruction assistance by United Nations agencies and between those agencies and non-governmental agencies, and to work with the Authority and the people of Iraq to estab­ lish institutions for representative governance. The special representative was also required to "report regularly to the Council on his activities under this resolution." No such requirement was placed on the Authority. Iraq was required to fulfill its pre-existing disarmament obligations, but here too responsibility was vested with the United States and Britain alone. There was no provision for independent monitoring and verification of Iraq's WMD, or their absence, and the Council was merely to "revisit" the man­ dates of UNMOVIC and the IAEA. The receipts from the sale of Iraq's oil were to be deposited in a Development Fund for Iraq, held by the Central Bank of Iraq and audited by independent public accountants appointed by an International Advisory and Monitoring Board (whose members were to include representatives of the Secretary-General, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the Arab Fund for Social and Economic Development). But its funds were to be disbursed entirely "at the direc­ tion of the Authority" in order "to meet the humanitarian needs of the Iraqi people, for the economic reconstruction and repair of Iraq's infra­ structure, for the continued disarmament of Iraq, and for the costs of Iraqi civilian administration, and for other purposes benefiting the people of Iraq." Finally, sanctions were to be lifted, and the oil-for-food program - on which 60 percent of the Iraqi population depended - was to be phased out within six months.147 Tariq Ali argued that most of the Arab world had seen Operation Iraqi Freedom as "a grisly charade, a cover for an old-fashioned European-style colonial occupation, constructed like its predecessors on the most rickety of foundations - innumerable falsehoods, cupidity and imperial fantasies." In his view, the adoption of Resolution 1483 which gave a central role

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In the absence of any kind of democratic process, what is being planned is not reparations, reconstruction or rehabilitation. It is robbery: mass theft disguised as charity; privatisation without representation. A people, starved and sickened by sanctions, then pulverised by war, is going to emerge from this trauma to find that their country has been sold out from under them.145

In fact, all these actions were illegal, like many others that were under­ taken unilaterally by the Office of Reconstruction and Humanitarian Aid. For the laws of belligerent occupation not only set out the duties of occupy­ ing powers; they also establish clear limits to their intervention. These cut through both planks of the coalition's platform. They prohibit any attempts at "wide-ranging reforms of governmental and administrative struc­ tures" and also the "imposition of major structural economic reforms." For these very reasons, Britain's Attorney-General had warned the govern­ ment in March that a United Nations Security Council resolution would be required to authorize post-war reconstruction. 146

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neither to the United Nations nor to the Iraqi people - confirmed that inter­ pretation: it "approved [Iraq's] re-colonization by the United States and its bloodshot British adjutant."148 Like all colonial projects, those most directly affected were not asked for their approval: power was vested unequivocally in the United States and Britain. But they needed their prox­ ies. After a protracted process of negotiation, the coalition announced the formation (not election) of the Iraqi Governing Council. This did little to silence critics who thought the coalition was presiding over a colonial occu­ pation. The composition of the 25-member Council duplicated the colonial strategy of institutionalizing sectarian divides within Iraq. The Council was given the power to draw up a draft constitution, to direct policy, and to nominate and dismiss ministers: but all its proposals were subject to veto by the coalition. The independence and integrity of the Council was an open question too. It was dominated by the same Iraqi exiles favored by the United States, some of whom had less than shining reputations, and its deliberations were closed and far from transparent. Salam Pax reported that Iraqis had difficulty even gaining admission to its press conferences, where, he daydreamed, a third channel of simultaneous translation would carry the truth: "We have no power, we have to get it approved by the Americans, we are puppets and the strings are too tight." The image of occupation mediated by marionettes became a commonplace among ordinary Iraqis: it was, wrote Riverbend, "the most elaborate puppet show Iraq has ever seen." 149 Everyone knew that day-to-day authority remained with the coalition, and, much as the majority of Iraqis rejoiced at the fall of Sad dam's brutal regime, they were increasingly antagonized by the ignor­ ance and arrogance of their occupiers. Many of them became resigned to the petty humiliations of occupation - the questions and permissions, the searches and encroachments - but for growing numbers of Iraqis resignation turned to resentment ( "They have no respect for us") and, eventually, to resistance. Resistance to the occupation multiplied and intensified throughout the summer. It was many-stranded: spontaneous and organized, non-violent and militarized. In Baghdad there were daily, often deadly, attacks against troops patrolling the streets, their assailants appearing from nowhere and disappearing into the crowd. "Every day the Americans hand out street maps of the Iraqi capital on which dangerous neighborhoods are marked in black," two journalists reported. "So far, the danger zones have not become smaller." Rocket-propelled grenades and mortars were used to ambush American convoys and to attack checkpoints in the so-called "Sunni

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triangle" north and west of Baghdad. The governorates of Anbar and Diyala, which had benefited from Saddam's patronage in the past, were major flash­ points. In June and July thousands of American troops, backed by tanks, helicopter gunships, and aircraft, undertook an aggressive series of raids against "Ba'ath party loyalists, paramilitary groups and other subversive elements" in the region. They uncovered what they claimed was a terrorist training camp, and seized large caches of arms. But the massive deploy­ ment of firepower, the indiscriminate use of force, and the heavy-handed searches (often in the middle of the night) antagonized local people and heightened opposition to the occupation among ordinary Iraqis. "Before I was afraid of Saddam," one elderly farmer said. "Now I am afraid of the Americans. " And, in a gesture redolent of other colonial counter­ insurgency operations, all those killed by American troops - over 300 were described by the military as "Iraqi fighters"; no civilian casualties were acknowledged. Other Iraqis saw the situation differently. "Saddam's tyrannical regime is being rapidly replaced by the tyranny of the occupa­ tion forces," one Iraqi exile wrote, "who are killing Iraqi civilians and unleashing Vietnam-style 'search and destroy' raids on Iraqi people's homes. " In his eyes, "the invasion of Iraq has developed into a colonial war." The new commander of CENTCOM, General John Abizaid preferred to call it a "low-intensity conflict," but he admitted "it's war however . you describe it." Meanwhile, demonstrations against the occupation had spread across the Shi'a south, with thousands in Basra (Iraq's second largest city), Najaf, and other places demanding the right to self-government and self-determination. At the end of June, in what was described as "the first serious confrontation in the south," six British soldiers were killed in two bloody ambushes near Amara. Popular resentment was widespread. In the largest anti-American demonstration, tens of thousands of Shi'a gathered in Najaf to demand the withdrawal of the occupying forces: "Down with the invaders" they chanted. The British fared little better. ·"The British occu­ piers are treating us the same way they tt-:eated us during colonial times in 1917, " one Basra politician complained, electing to deal with tribal leaders rather than political parties because they refused to recognize the legitimacy of the Shi'a opposition. By July even the tribal leaders were losing patience. "We met them with roses," said one, "but when we can no longer bear our frustration, the rose in their hands will become the dagger in their breasts." 150 In August the coalition was still trying to talk down the crisis, and to Insist on the "dual realities" of what one journalist called "chaos and calm." _

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Yet even this was an admission that Iraq was now divided "between those willing to put up with the American occupation" - his words, my em­ phasis - "and those determined to fight it." And the balance between the two seemed to be shifting. While most Iraqis remained reluctant to seek political confrontation with the coalition, still less to risk arined conflict, resistance to the occupation escalated throughout the month. There were major riots in Basra, where British troops in riot gear struggled to regain control of the city, and although the coalition downplayed their signifi­ cance - "a storm in a teacup," according to British authorities - reporters found that local people were seething with anger at the occupation and its chronic failings. lSI The protests in Basra seem to have been spontaneous, but elsewhere opposition of a radically different order was making its appear­ ance. A car bomb exploded at the Jordanian embassy in Baghdad, killing 17 people and wounding scores more; another bomb tore a hole in a large water main in the capital, flooding streets and cutting off supplies to thou­ sands of people; and in the north the pipeline from Kirkuk to Ceyhan was sabotaged, setting off fierce fires that blazed out of control and suspend­ ing the crucial export of oil to Turkey.152 Then the United Nations mis­ sion to Baghdad came under terrorist attack. The old Canal hotel had been used as a base by UN weapons inspectors and sanctions monitors before the war - it became known as "the Sanctions Building" - and it remained a soft target after the UN mission moved in. Its local secretariat had refused high-level security in order to distance the mission from the fortified compounds of the occupying power. On August 19 a massive truck bomb exploded outside, devastating the building and a nearby hospital. At least 23 people were killed, including the UN special representative in Iraq, Sergio Vieira de Mello, and more than 100 injured, many of them seriously. Most Iraqis were appalled by the mass murder of civilians from many different countries, and there was considerable speculation about the identities and ' motives of those responsible for the atrocity. Although there were several reasons why the United Nations could have been the object of such an attack (UN-mandated sanctions and UN Security Council Resolution 1483 to name but two), the real target seemed to be the occupation itself. For the attack was a hideous reversal of the coalition's own strategy of "shock and awe." What one journalist described as "the horrifying spec­ tacle of a major building in the capital blown apart" was designed not only to demonstrate the strength of the opposition but also to isolate the coalition through intimidation. Baghdad was already a city under siege, but the blast heightened the sense of impotence and vulnerability. The

primary objective was to deter others from coming to the assistance of the coalition and hence to increase the burden of the occupation upon the United States. IS3 Three weeks earlier Bremer had downplayed the significance of the deter­ iorating security situation and, consistent with his brief to privatize Iraq, declared that his first priority was to restore the confidence of foreign in­ vestors. "The most important questions will not be [those] relating to secur­ ity," he insisted, "but to the conditions under which foreign investment will be invited in. ,, 154 But the summer whirlwind of violence - above all, the attack on the UN mission - had a dramatic chilling effect. Investments were put on hold, and foreign companies and international humanitarian agencies withdrew personnel. The Bush administration made no secret of its desire to involve troops and resources from other countries, but other governments were now markedly reluctant to commit themselves to a US­ led occupation. Yet Washington refused to cede its political or military authority over Iraq, and dismissed out of hand arguments for a multi­ national peacekeeping force and a reconstruction process authorized by and accountable to the UN. With this impasse, it seemed not only that "a sophisticated campaign to destabilize the occupation was spreading," as Justin Huggler concluded, but that it was also succeeding. I SS The numbers were already alarming. The White House had assured Americans that the war would pay for itself (and then some). In March Wolfowitz had told a Senate committee that Iraq "can really finance its own reconstruction, and relatively soon." But by July even the most con­ servative estimate of the direct military cost of occupation (Rumsfeld's) put it at $1 billion a week, which represented a significant contribution to the ballooning federal deficit. And this took no account of the costs of reconstruction. l s6 The human cost to coalition forces was no less disturbing. By the time Bush declared the end of major combat operations in Iraq on May 1, 1 3 1 American and 8 British troops had been killed in action; but between May 1 and August 24, another 64 American and 10 British troops had been killed by hostile action. Public sfrutiny of the rising toll of dead and wounded was discouraged; the media were not allowed to photograph the return of the coffins of US servicemen and women, and seriously injured troops were flown into Andrews air force base in the dead of night.1S7 Faced with this concatenation of increasingly violent events, the Bush administration claimed that two main groups were responsible. First, there were members of the Republican Guard, the Fedayeen Saddam militia and other diehard Saddam loyalists: the "dead-enders," Rumsfeld called them.

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A taped message from the fugitive Saddam claimed that "jihad cells and brigades have been formed" and praised "our great mujaheddin" for inflicting hardship on "the infidel invaders." There were also reports that Saddam's intelligence agency had drawn up plans to subvert the occupa­ tion through sabotage, attacking oil pipelines and other crucial installa­ tions. There can be little doubt that remnants of the regime - including some drawn from the ranks of the Iraqi army that Bremer had so summarily dissolved - were responsible for some of the attacks. But, as Graham Usher argued, "to claim that the former Iraqi dictator is the ghost behind all of the resistance is to deny a reality the occupation - every bit as much as his collapsed regime has created. . . . The resistance strikes resonate among a people outraged by an administration that appears unable to find solutions to the most basic problems." Bracketing, for a moment, the terrible bomb attacks in Baghdad, many of the strikes appeared to com­ mand a considerable measure of popular support, and Iraqis killed in the guerrilla war north and west of Baghdad were often celebrated in their home towns and villages as martyrs. Saddam's attempt to appropriate Islam for his own purposes neither diminishes nor devalues the intimacy of the connections between politics and religion. One imam insisted that it was simply wrong to attribute the attacks on occupying forces to renegades. "They are coming from ordinary people and the Islamic resistance," he explained, "because the Americans haven't fulfilled their promises." Every morning in Baghdad cleaning crews were sent out to paint over graffiti that had appeared on walls during the night, and the slogans seemed to confirm this view of the diversity of the resistance: Not only "No Iraq without Saddam" but also "No dignity under the Americans" and "We demand from our imams a call to jihad. ,,158 It bears repeating that those broken promises were not fundamentally about power lines and water pipes. "The Americans said they were coming to liberate the country, not occupy it," a prominent human rights activist, Walid al-Hilli, reminded reporters. "Now they are occupying Iraq and refusing to allow Iraqis to form their own gov\!rnment. " This was the heart of the matter, and it was for this reason that it was so flatly denied. As Jonathan Steele remarked, "it is easier to claim that the resistance comes from 'remnants of the past' than recognize that it is fuelled by grievances about the present and doubts about the future." 159 Secondly - and crucially for the White House - there were the "foreign fighters" who, Rumsfeld had warned the Iraqi people in an early message, were "seeking to hijack your country for their own purposes." This was

Figure 8.4

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"Foreign fighters" (Steve Bell, Guardian, July 2, 2003)

a stupefyingly rich remark even then, but it became a common refrain. As the guerrilla war intensified, a senior Defense Department official claimed that "there are clearly more foreign fighters in the country than we ever knew, and they're popping up all over" (figure 8.4). When Wolfowitz returned from a brief tour of Iraq he demanded that "all foreigners should stop interfering in the internal affairs of Iraq." As Simon Schama once remarked, "A slippery thing is this colonial geography!" Americans in Iraq presumably do not count as "foreign" because they are universal soldiers fighting for a transcendent Good. One hardly knows what to say when faced with rhetorical claims like these, which have America swallow Iraq whole until it becomes "America's Iraq.,, 160 But the response of most Iraqis to that predatory possessive should have been predictable, and so too should the reaction from the Islamic world at large. "In the same way as the Russian invasion of Afghanistan stirred an earlier generation of young Muslims determined to fight the infidel," it was argued, "the American presence in Iraq is prompting a rising tide of Muslim militants to slip into the country

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to fight the foreign occupier." But there was a critical, incendiary differ­ ence between the two. Unlike Afghanistan, Iraq is part of the heartland of Islam. Najaf and Karbala are among the holiest cities of Islam after Mecca and Medina; Basra and Kufah were founded by the early Umayyad caliphate; and Baghdad was the capital of the Abbasid caliphate for 500 years. It should not have been surprising that Iraq's occupation by the United States would turn it into a new field of jihad for political Islam. Maureen Dowd recalled that before the war Bush "made it sound as if Islamic fighters on a jihad against America were slouching towards Baghdad." At the time, she had dismissed this as an overwrought Gothic fantasy. But now, she argued, "the Bush team has created the very monster that it conjured up to alarm Americans into backing a war on Iraq." This is Afghanistan aggrandized and the performative with a vengeance. As Raban put it, "our dangerous new world is one in which seeming rhetorical embellishments are fast morphing into statements of literal fact. ,,16 1 It was not long before the specter of al-Qaeda stalked the battlefield. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a close adviser of Osama bin Laden, had already called for al-Qaeda "to move the battlefront to the heart of the Islamic world, " and the American occupation of Iraq made that possibility come vividly alive. The leader of Ansar aI-Islam, a small Kurdish Islamicist group hostile to Saddam Hussein and linked to al-Qaeda, obligingly declared that "there is no difference between this occupation and the Soviet occupation of Afghanistan, " and Washington described the group as "the backbone of the underground network. ,,1 62 There was little hard evidence to sup­ port such a claim, but the Bush administration understood its rhetorical power. "Iraq is now the central battle in the w:ar on terrorism, " Wolfowitz announced , and after the attack on the UN mission in Baghdad, for which some officials held Ansar ai-Islam responsible, Bush lost little time in repeating his familiar mantra. The terrorists were "enemies of the civilized world, " and the Iraqi people faced a choice: "The terrorists want to return to the days of torture chambers and mass graves. The Iraqis who want peace and freedom must reject them and fight terror." 163 I fully accept that the attack on the UN in Baghdad was terrorism - as despicable as it was deadly - but the Bush administration, taking a leaf from the book of Ariel Sharon and many of his predecessors, unscrupu­ lously used this outrage to tar any resistance to its "liberation" of Iraq as terrorism. The red flag, according to Bush, was "every sign of progress in Iraq." Leaving on one side the president's Panglossian view of post-war Iraq, such a claim worked, yet again, to place the United States on the

side of the angels. Any opposition to its mission was not only mistaken but also malevolent. To Fisk, "any mysterious 'terrorists' will do, if this covers up a painful reality: that our occupation has spawned a real home­ grown Iraqi guerrilla army capable of humbling the greatest power on Earth." 164 This was probably an overstatement too. Various armed groups emerged from among the Shi'a and Sunni communities, including the Army of al-Mahdi, the Army of Right, the Army of Mohammed, and the White Flags, but these hardly constituted a unified resistance.165 Still, Fisk was surely right about the camouflage. The generic invocation of "terrorism" was an attempt to rehabilitate one of Bush's central arguments for the war, to obscure the reality of occupation and to try to rescue the American mission in Iraq by reflagging it as another front in the continuing "war on terror." What Washington refused to countenance was that the two groups which they blamed for the political violence in Iraq - Sad dam loyalists and foreign fighters - were paralleled by two other groups to which most ordinary Iraqis remained equally and increasingly opposed: Bush's loyalists and his foreign fighters. The violence did not wane with the heat of the summer. In August there had been an average of 12 attacks a day on American forces, and this rose to 1 5 in early September. By the beginning of October there were more than 25 a day, and at the end of that month 33 a day. Large areas of Baghdad were declared "hostile, " and the guerrilla war expanded beyond the Sunni heartland into the north and south of the country. Between the beginning of May and the beginning of December nearly 40 percent of attacks on coalition targets were outside the "Sunni Triangle.,,166 More resistance groups were formed; most informed estimates reckoned there were at least a dozen in operation by the end of the summer, but some suggested that there were as many as 40. Some groups consisted of cells loosely linked in a chain of command; others coordinated their attacks and collaborated with one another; still others operated more or less in­ dependently. There was a constant background of hit-and-run attacks on coalition forces using small arms, but the sophistication of major attacks increased as some groups started to use improvised explosive devices and rocket-propelled grenades while others carried out more suicide car and truck bombings. As the attacks accelerated, several analysts repeated that that an insurgency had been planned by the Iraqi regime before the war. This was probably true, but by no means all of the guerrilla groups were the spawn of the Iraqi security services, and neither were they all Ba'athist. While the guerrillas certainly included militants from the deposed regime,

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there were many other groups involved: criminal gangs were contracted to carry out some of the attacks, as the coalition alleged, but the major­ ity seem to have been carried out by Islamist and nationalist partisans, who were joined or supported by increasing numbers of ordinary Iraqis who were antagonized by the occupation. 167 It is difficult to generalize about the organization of so many different groups, but there were considerable tensions between the former military officers and Fedayeen militia on one side and the mujaheddin and nationalists on the other. The fluidity of the situation was complicated still further by the range of targets involved. Attacks on US (and British) military forces continued, and the number of coalition troops killed or wounded soared (figure 8.5). But there were also attacks on others, especially civilians, which is where armed resistance slides into terrorism. In general, these other attacks fulfilled two strategic objectives. First, the intensifying attacks combined with the escalating reactions they provoked from coalition forces to cut the fragile and fraying threads con­ necting the occupiers to the occupied. Repeated acts of sabotage and attacks on coalition contractors continued to disrupt the reconstruction process. Far from a Baghdad skyline bristling with cranes, two journalists reported that "there are no visible signs of reconstruction [in the capital] at all," and Iraq's infrastructure remained in a worse state than it had been under Saddam. Interruptions in electricity and water supplies continued. "You really can't appreciate light until you look down upon a blackened city and your eyes are drawn to the pinpoints of brightness provided by gen­ erators," Riverbend wrote in her weblog. "It looks like the heavens have fallen and the stars are wandering the streets of Baghdad lost and alone." Less poetically, she described the ordinariness and oppressiveness of every­ day life under occupation: struggling with gas cylinders whenever the elec­ tricity was cut, and desperately filling pots, buckets, and bottles whenever the water came back on. Equally prosaically, the price of gasoline soared and drivers waited in line all day to fill their tanks. "Of all things," one weary manager of a gas station remarked, "we never thought we'd be with­ out gasoline in Iraq. ,, 168 Public order remained precarious, and Iraqis continued to be assailed by the chronic incidence of murders, kidnappings, robberies, rapes, and assaults, and by a series of spectacular ruptures as terrorist violence was directed against the civilian population. At the end of August a massive car bomb exploded outside the Imam Ali mosque in Najaf, killing more than 1 00 Shi'a Muslims including the most influential cleric allied with

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the coalition, the Ayatollah Mohammed Baqir aI-Hakim. The devastation was dreadful: "The brick facades of shops were sheared away. Cars were flipped and hurled onto the sidewalk. Burned, mangled and dismembered bodies littered the streets, trampled as others ran in confusion and panic for safety." The three-day funeral obsequies moved between Karbala,

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Baghdad, and Najaf, and while there were chants of "Death to the Ba'athists" - the Shi'a had suffered from decades of repression under Saddam, and many people pointed the finger of suspicion at those who remained loyal to the old regime - the murdered Ayatollah's brother, a member of the Iraqi Governing Council, proclaimed that "the occupation force is primarily responsible for the pure blood that was spilled in holy Najaf" and demanded that the occupying powers leave "so that we can build Iraq as God wants us to. ,,169 The next month a truck bomb exploded outside the Baghdad headquarters of the reconstituted Iraqi Police, "rein­ forcing the popular perception that the occupying powers were unable to protect themselves let alone the public," and this was followed by repeated attacks on other police stations. In early October one of only three women appointed to the Governing Council died after being shot outside her home, and a couple of weeks later another huge car bomb exploded outside the Baghdad hotel, used by members of the Governing Council, killing six Iraqi security guards and injuring more than 35 other people.170 In America's Iraq, all these attacks were so many signs of success. "The more progress we make on the ground," Bush repeated, "the more desperate these killers become." One could be forgiven for thinking that desperation was a two-way street. Journalists who were on the ground, and who had a more intimate knowledge of the experiences and emotions of ordinary Iraqis than the desk-warriors, saw an altogether different coun­ try. "Iraq under the US-led occupation is a fearful, lawless and broken place," Suzanne Goldenberg wrote in October. Saddam's Republic of Fear had gone, "but its replacement is a violent chaos." The midnight knock on the door was no longer Saddam's secret police "but it could very well be an armed robber, an enforcer from a political faction, or an enemy intent on revenge. ,, 171 Although Goldenberg did not say so, it could also be the US army. Riverbend wrote of the "humiliation, anger and resentment" aroused by standard weapons searches, but she also described other raids that were much more degrading: "Families marched outside, hands behind their backs and bags on their heads; fathers and sons pushed on the ground, a booted foot on their head or back." In other cases, it was even worse: tanks crashing through walls in the dead of night, sledgehammers break­ ing down doors, prisoners pushed and shoved outside, duct tape slapped over their eyes and plastic cuffs snapped on their wrists; houses ransacked, torn upside-down by soldiers bellowing abuse and leaving with their frightened prisoners to the blare of rock music echoing through the

streets.172 If the objective was to make an impression on the Iraqi popu­ lation, it succeeded. Was this the "liberation" they had been promised? A second series of terrorist attacks faced outwards rather than inwards. It was guided by what Mark Danner identified as the "methodical inten­ tion to sever, one by one, with patience, care, and precision, the fragile lines that still tie the occupation authority to the rest of the world. " Two months after the attack on the Jordanian embassy and the UN headquarters in Baghdad, the Turkish embassy was rocked by a suicide car bomb. At the end of the same month a rocket attack on the aI-Rashid hotel, where Wolfowitz and other "internationals" were staying, was followed by a mas­ sive suicide bombing at the headquarters of the International Red Cross. On November 1 8 Italian paramilitary police and 13 Iraqis were killed in a suicide attack in Nasiriya. This string of attacks was directed, as Danner notes, against "countries that supported the Americans in the war (Jordan), that support the occupation with troops (Italy) or professed a willingness to do so (Turkey). They struck at the heart of an 'international community' that could, with increased involvement, help give the occu­ pation both legitimacy (the United Nations) and material help in rebuild­ ing the country (the Red CrosS). ,,173 The Iraqi response to these widening circles of violence was complicated. The unequivocal horror that most of them had expressed at the attack on the United Nations was reaffirmed when other international organizations were targeted and whenever ordinary Iraqis were the victims. When Patrick Cockburn interviewed people on the streets of Baghdad after the attack on the Red Cross, everyone he spoke to was aghast. But "all, without excep­ tion, approved of the attacks on the aI-Rashid hotel and US soldiers." When Saddam's regime fell, he said that Iraqis were more or less evenly divided between those who welcomed American liberation and those who opposed colonial occupation. Now, he concluded, "hatred of the occupation is ex­ pressed openly." As this implied, the identification between the resistance and the population at large had grown closer than the coalition acknowl­ edged. "Coalition press officers talk of attacking 'guerrilla hideouts' and buildings being used as 'meeting places' for the rebels," Peter Beaumont noted, "suggesting a guerrilla army living in the field, separate from the population. In reality, the hideouts are people's homes, their headquar­ ters apartments and living rooms.,,174 Support for the resistance was not universal, to be sure, but it was widespread and becoming wider; and oppo­ sition to the occupation - armed or otherwise - was intensifying.

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The American-led response was two-pronged. The first was political. In September, Secretary of State Colin Powell had warned that Washington would not be rushed into transferring power to an Iraqi administration; a week later Bush told the United Nations that the transition to self­ government "must unfold according to the needs of the Iraqis - neither hurried nor delayed by the voices of other parties." That was still the view - "prevailing wisdom" is hardly the right phrase - when the USA and the UK returned to the United Nations Security Council in the middle of October to obtain a new mandate: they flatly refused to commit themselves to any timetable for the transfer of power.175 In November, however, an intelli­ gence assessment from the CIA station chief in Baghdad made no bones about it: the situation was rapidly slipping out of control. The report estim­ ated that tens of thousands were now involved in the resistance and con­ ceded that these were by no means all hardcore Ba'athists or foreign fighters. Bremer abruptly flew to Washington, and within days the White House announced that the transfer of power would be accelerated. What had been dismissed as imprudent and impossible less than a month earlier was suddenly imperative. Organizing committees (on which the Governing Council would have an effective veto) were to be established in each of Iraq's 18 governorates; these would select caucus members, who would in turn select representatives for a transitional national assembiy in the spring. The assembly would then elect a "democratic, pluralistic" interim government by July 2004, and its assumption of power would mark the formal end of occupation; the Coalition Provisional Authority would be dissolved, and the foundations laid for the election of a new Iraqi gov­ ernment in a general election by the end of 2005. 1 76 But the proposals were immediately contested. Grand Ayatollah Ali Sistani, the most influential Shi'ite cleric in Iraq, demanded that the transitional assembly be elected by the Iraqi people - a procedure which would weaken the power of the Governing Council over the process - and many Shi'ites saw the propos­ als for regional caucuses overseen by "the puppets" as a ruse to prolong the occupation: "The Americans will never leave Iraq," one man told reporters. "Jihad is the only way to get them out." As the year turned, so tens of thousands of Shiites marched in the streets of major cities to demand full, direct, and, as Sistani repeatedly put it, "proper" elections. With the hunt for WMD proving fruitless, Bush increasingly talked as though one of the central aims of the war had been to bring democracy and freedom to the Iraqi people: they were now taking him at his word and calling for exactly that. Posters proclaimed that "Forming the provisional national

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assembly through an unjust method will subject the Iraqi people to a new round of oppression." The White House, the Provisional Authority, and the Governing Council temporized, arguing that there was insufficient time to organize elections. Many experts, inside and outside Iraq, disputed the claim. A more plausible reason for their reluctance was provided by the Authority'S adviser on constitutional law. "If you move too fast," he told the New York Times, "the wrong people might get elected. " It was, as Robert Scheer concluded, "colonial politics as usual." 1 77 The second prong of the new American strategy was military. Deter­ mined to crack down hard on the insurgency and the civilian population that supported the guerrillas, the US army activated the lessons it had learned from the Israeli Defence Force in the occupied territories of Palestine. The level of military response was ratcheted up: firepower increased with the use of heavy tanks, artillery, and massive bombs dropped from aircraft to level suspected "guerrilla bases" in the largest air bombardment since May 1. It was the same story on the ground. The coalition had constantly disparaged remnants of the old regime, but it now had no compunction in using them to infiltrate the resistance, copying the use of Arab in­ formers by the Israeli intelligence services. American troops turned Iraqi towns and villages into simulacra of the West Bank. Perimeters were ringed with razor wire, hung with signs reading "This fence is for your protec­ tion. Do not approach or try to cross or you will be shot," English­ language identity cards were issued, and residents were forced to wait at military checkpoints to be scrutinized and searched. One man waiting in line told a reporter, "I see no difference between us and the Palestinians." Troops imposed curfews and 15-hour lockdowns. "This is absolutely humil­ iating," a primary school teacher said: "We are like birds in a cage." Elsewhere, in another ghastly echo of the Israeli occupation, bulldozers were brought in to uproot palm trees and groves of citrus, and the homes of suspected guerrillas were summarily demolished. "This just what Sharon would do," one furious farmer told a reporter. "What's happening in Iraq is just like Palestine." There were differences between the two, of course, but the aggression and intimidation, and the studied disregard for human rights and human dignity, scored parallels that few Iraqis missed. "With a heavy dose of fear and violence," one battalion commander declared, "and a lot of money for projects, I think we can convince these people that we are here to help them." 1 78 There were few signs of projects, but there was no mistaking the fear and violence. In fact, it was revealed that Israeli officers had trained assassination squads at Fort Bragg to replicate

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the IDF strategy of "targeted killings." Here, as elsewhere, Bush's vaunted "war on terror" had become a war ofterror. "Terrorism versus terrorism," one officer confirmed. "We've got to scare the Iraqis into submission." 1 79 On the surface, the two strategies - "Iraqification" and "Israelization" - seem to be contradictory, since one works toward a transfer of power to the Iraqi people and the other works to repress them. But the contra­ diction is resolved through a split screen. On one side, the principal audi­ ence for these displays of political and military power was not in Iraq at all but in the United States. By November 2003 the American presiden­ tial election was only 12 months away. The banner draped behind Bush when he gave his "victory" speech on May 1 had proclaimed "Mission . accomplished"; but it was already in tatters, and the CIA intelligence assess­ ment showed that it could soon fall around the president's head. Bush's political staff was thoroughly alarmed. But they quickly realized that if the formal occupation could be seen to have been brought to an end by the early summer, then, as Robin Wright and Thomas Ricks commented, Bush would be able to hand over responsibility "for both a deteriorating security situation and a stalled political process" and enter the final phase of the campaign unburdened by the baggage he had left in Iraq (unless, I suppose, he was asked if he had packed it himself). On the other side, however, the occupation would continue in all but name, and the impress of American political, economic, and military might would still be felt in Iraq. Whatever its formal status, the occupation would not end in any sub­ stantial sense. Indeed, the IDF strategy of violent repression in Palestine is predicated on a long-term occupation - containing the Intifada, not re­ moving the grounds for its continuation - and the Pentagon made no secret of its expectation that tens of thousands of troops would remain in Iraq at the "invitation" of the new government. No doubt it also anticipated the permanent military bases that would need to be established on Iraqi soil. American political and economic influence would scarcely diminish either. Not only would the United States continue to control the billions of dollars authorized by Congress for reconstruction, but the coalition had already authorized the privatization of 200 Iraqi companies and, through Order 39 of September 19 (which "promotes and safeguards the general welfare and interests of the Iraqi people by promoting foreign invest­ ment through the protection of the rights of foreign investors in Iraq"), guaranteed foreign corporations unlimited access to the country's most profitable banks and industries (except the oil and gas industry, which was fast becoming a liability rather than an asset) and permitted them to

repatriate their profits without restriction. As The Economist said, it was a "capitalist dream." For most Iraqis, it was a nightmare. "Iraq is being sold," wrote Riverbend, and "people are outraged "; but not, it seems, sur­ prised. "After all, the puppets have been bought," she said, "why not buy the stage?" Ahmad Chalabi airily dismissed such concerns: "The culture of the Iraqis has been a culture of fear that foreigners would take advan­ tage of the country." Just so. It was clear that the occupying powers had imposed fundamental policies determining the future of ordinary Iraqis, and Klein was surely right to conclude that if a sovereign government came to power tomorrow - or in the summer of 2004 - Iraq would still be occu­ pied "by laws written in the interest of another country and by foreign corporations controlling its essential services." "Even after a military occupation," Riverbend observed, "we'll be under an economic occupa­ tion for years to come. ,, 1 80

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As that last clause shows, most Iraqis have little difficulty in seeing the split screen, which means that the capture of Saddam Hussein - how­ ever it plays in the United States - is unlikely to make much difference to the resistance. As I have repeatedly emphasized, the insurgency is not uniquely defined by Saddam loyalists and those working for the return of Ba'athism, and it seems self-evident that the disheveled, dirty old man who was finally hauled from his spider-hole in the middle of December was no longer directing anything. In Iraq there were mixed emotions at his cap­ ture. Disbelief yielded to anger in Sunni neighborhoods in Baghdad and around Saddam's hometown; there were large pro-Saddam demonstrations in Mosul and Tikrit, and pro-Saddam riots in Falluja and Ramadi. But there was also widespread rejoicing throughout the Shi'a and Kurdish areas, and pro-American rallies in Baghdad.l 8 l Yet this division conceals as much as it reveals. For many Iraqis not only suffered under Saddam's rule: they also blamed him for bringing about the occupation of their country. Just days after Saddam's arrest, Edward Wong reported that "the joyous bursts of gunfire that echoed through parts of Iraq" at the news of his capture were "already a distant memory." He was writing from the Shi'ite village of Mahawil, 8 0 kilometers south of Baghdad, which is the site of one of the largest mass graves in Iraq. After the Shi'a uprising in March and April 1991 as many as 15,000 bodies were buried there, and many (perhaps most) local families had lost members to Saddam's execution squads. And yet Wong reported that "many people are left won­ dering how they will push on with their daily lives in a country controlled by a foreign power and filled with political and economic uncertainty."

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"One would expect the people of Mahawil to be clamoring for account­ ability from the imprisoned Mr Hussein," he concluded. "So they are, but they are also clamoring even louder for accountability from the American occupiers. ,, 1 82 It seems certain that the ongoing occupation - formal or informal - will continue to perplex, affront, and alienate vast sections of Iraqi society, and it seems very likely that more people will join the resistance. There are also good reasons to suppose that this will now take on an even more pro­ nounced religious and nationalist temper. The influential young leader of the Sadr movement, Muqtada al-Sadr, has already demanded that Order 39 be repealed "or we will act." His support among Shi'ites in east Baghdad, Basra, Karbala, Kufa, Najaf, and Samarra is considerable, and he claims that his "Army of al-Mahdi" has enlisted 1 0,000 young men. He insists that his is a "non-violent" movement, but the provocations of occupation seem unlikely to diminish, and it seems only too probable that paramilitary violence will increase. 1 83 It may also be aggravated by sectarian conflict. There have been reports that the Sunni "Clear Victory Movement" plans to establish a militia in response (and as a challenge) to the "Army of al-Mahdi," and there have been repeated clashes between Kurds and Sunni Arabs in Kirkuk and Mosul. But I doubt that these anta­ gonisms will supplant opposition to the occupation. Indeed, Robert Fisk reports that "more and more Iraqis were saying before Saddam's capture that the one reason they would not join the resistance was the fear that - if the Americans withdrew - Saddam would return to power. Now that fear has been taken away. So the nightmare is over - and the nightmare is about to begin. ,, 1 84 None of this should be surprising. For the imaginative geographies of colonial power have reasserted themselves: the divisions between "us" and "them," "occupier" and "occupied." During the summer and autumn of 2003 they had become ever more visible in the new geography of occu­ pied Baghdad. The occupiers established themselves within a, vast complex of buildings on the west bank of the Tigris that was once the preserve of Saddam and his apparatus of power and repression. His vast Republican Palace has become the headquarters of the Coalition Provisional Author­ ity - in its way, another Republican Palace. The whole area, studded with parks, lakes, and fountains, intersected by wide, tree-lined avenues, is pro­ tected by a triple perimeter: an inner series of barriers and concertina wire, and an outer blast wall of reinforced concrete topped with razor wire, rein­ forced by sandbagged bunkers and concrete dragon's teeth, ringed by troops

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and tanks. Beyond the point of entry to this so-called "Green Zone," across the 14th of July Bridge, is the rest of Baghdad - "the Red Zone" - and Iraq, and the advice to Americans and the internationals working with them is unequivocal: "Do not travel there unless you have urgent business." Inside "the Bubble" is another world. "It's like I never left America," said one American interpreter. In this Baghdad - America's Baghdad - "they serve peanut butter, lobster and ice-cream. The cell phones have a 914 [White Plains, New York] area code. The television sets show Monday Night Football. The people speak English." 1 85 This is the classical geometry of colonial occupation, of course. But the precariousness of its partitions was revealed when Bush made his extraordinary visit to American troops on Thanks­ giving Day. This was not the triumphant entry to the capital that he must have anticipated six months earlier. The flight was made under conditions of the utmost secrecy. Air Force One had to make a corkscrew approach to Baghdad International Airport, with its windows blacked out and landing lights off for fear of a rocket attack. Bush was on the ground for a little over two hours; he never left the heavily fortified airport compound and met no ordinary Iraqis. "Why didn't he walk the streets of the coun­ try he helped 'liberate?' " asked Riverbend. The answer, as she knew only too well, was that Bush's target audience was in the United States not Iraq, and that he never visited Iraq: he visited "America's Iraq." He had time to do little more than pose with a turkey before cutting and running.1 86

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Gravity's Rainbows

A screaming comes across the sky. It has happened before but there is noth­ ing to compare it to now. Thomas Pynchon, Gravity's Rainbow

T

HE

Connective Dissonance

world does not exist in order to provide illustrations of our theories, and I am determined not to erase the particularities of the wars in Afghanistan, Palestine, and Iraq. But it seems clear that in these interlinked situations the imaginative geographies that were given such terrifying force by the events of September 1 1 were connected to perfor­ mances of space that have been (and continue to be) deployed in other circumstances. In the shadow of the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, three strategic moves were made by the increasingly interdigitated administrations in Washington and Tel Aviv. These can be identified as: locating, opposing, and casting out. "Locating" mobilized a largely technical register, in which opponents were reduced to objects in a purely visual field - coordinates on a grid, letters on a map - that produced an abstraction of other people as "the other." American bombs and missiles rained down on K-A-B-U-L, not on the eviscerated city of Kabul; Israeli troops turned their guns on Pale­ stinian "targets" not on Palestinian men, women, and children; American firepower destroyed Baghdad buildings and degraded the Iraqi military machine but never killed Iraqis.

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"Opposing" mobilized a largely cultural register, in which antagonism was reduced to a conflict between a unitary Civilization and multiple bar­ barisms. This was no clash of civilizations because that was war in a minor key; the war on terror was war in a major key. America, with its proxies and allies, was called to take up arms against the gathering forces of dark­ ness: of Evil incarnate. Osama bin Laden, and Saddam Hussein became Doppelgangers, inversions of the face of Goodness reflected in the White House mirror, with fateful consequences for the people of Afghanistan and Iraq, while fundamentalists on both the Christian and the Zionist right saw the dispossession of the Palestinians as fulfilling God's ultimate pur­ pose. All were barbarians to be summarily dispatched. "Casting out" mobilized a largely political-juridical register, in which not only armed opponents - al-Qaeda rerrorists, Taliban troops, Pale­ stinian fighters, Iraqi soldiers - but also civilians and refugees were reduced to the status of homines sacri. Their lives did not matter. The sovereign powers of the American, British, and Israeli states disavowed or suspended the law so that men, women, and children were made out­ casts, placed beyond the pale and beyond the privileges and protections of the Modern. The deaths of American, British, and Israeli citizens mattered, unless of course they were killed opposing or witnessing the wars in Afghanistan, Palestine, or Iraq. But in this grisly colonial calculus the deaths of Afghans, Palestinians, and Iraqis were rendered not only uncountable but also unaccountable. A series of economic priorities and practices moved through each of these registers, but in the preceding chapters I have been most concerned with their physical and corporeal consequences. Each of them shows how performances of space articulated through imaginative geographies can fold difference into distance, simultaneously conjuring up and holding at bay the strange, the unnatural, the monstrous. "Given their monstrosity," Zygmunt Bauman wrote, "one cannot but thank God for making them what they are - the far away locals, and pray that they stay that way." The language of the monstrous - the throwback, the half-human, the de­ generate - was repeatedly used to characterize America's opponents in Afghanistan and Iraq, and Israel's opponents in Palestine. But distance is never an absolute, fixed and frozen, and within the colonial present, like the colonial past, the power to transform distance - like the power to re­ present others as other - is typically arrogated by metropolitan cultures. Bauman distinguished between "residents of the first world" - "tourists," he called them - who he said live pre-eminently in time, who can span

25 1

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every distance with effortless ease, and who move because they want to, and "residents of the second world" - "vagabonds" - who live pre­ eminently in space, "heavy, resilient, untouchable," and who travel surreptitiously and often illegally because they have no other bearable choice.! This is, of course, a cartoonish distinction, and in any case the tourists depend on the vagabonds in all sorts of ways, not least on their cheap labor as sweatshop workers or undocumented migrants. But if this is a caricature, it's a recognizable one. For part of the shock of September 1 1 was surely its abrupt reversal of metropolitan privilege. On that bright morn­ ing, distance was spectacularly compressed and liquid modernity turned into fire. The horror, said Bauman, "brought the untouchable within touch, the invisible within sight, the distant within the neighbourhood."2 Listen to these words from American novelist Don DeLillo written soon after the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon:

apart. Through money laundering, the drug trade, urban crime, asylum­ seeking, arms trading, people smuggling, slave trading and urban terrorism, the spaces of the wild and the safe are chaotically juxtaposed, time and space is being "curved" into new complex configurations.4

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Our world, parts of our world, have crumbled into theirs, which means we are living in a place of danger and rage . . . . The terrorists of September 1 1 want to bring back the past . . . . The future has yielded, for now, to medieval experience, to the old slow furies of cutthroat religion . . . . Now a small group of men have literally altered our skyline. We have fallen back in time and space. . . . There is a sense of compression, plans made hurriedly, time forced and distorted.3

Time and space crumbled, collapsed, compressed: not by us but by "them"; not on our terms but on "theirs." "They" were not Bauman's vagabonds - those responsible for the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were hardly the wretched of the earth - but they did come from a world away. It was a world made strange long before transnational terrorism erupted in the heart of metropolitan America. For John Urry, September 1 1 was a dramatic rupture in which the world's "safe zones" and "wild zones" - "civiliza­ tion" and "barbarism" ? - "collided in the sky above New York." But he also saw it as an event that brought into view a vast subterranean move­ ment whose time-space compressions preceded the attacks and extended beyond them. The flows from the wild zones of people, risks, substances, images, Kalashnikovs . . . increasingly slip under, over and through the safe gates, suddenly and chaotically eliminating the invisibilities that had kept the zones

It is through these "curvatures" - torsions of time and space - that colon­ ialism is made over, reinscribed, and rehabilitated in our own present. "Terror has collapsed distance," wrote Michael Ignatieff after September 1 1, "and with this collapse has come a sharpened American focus on bring­ ing order to the frontier zones." Later he staked the same claim in these terms: America has now felt the tremor of dread that the ancient world must have known when Rome was first sacked. Then and now an imperial people has awakened to the menace of the barbarians. Just beyond the zone of stable democratic states, which took the World Trade Center and the Pentagon as its headquarters, there are the border zones where, thanks to modern technology, they are able to inflict devastating damage on centres of power far away. Retribution has been visited on the barbarians, and more will fol­ low. . . . Terror has collapsed distance, and with this collapse has come a sharpened focus in imperial capitals on the necessity of bringing order to the barbarian zones.5

As these comments imply, those orderings were often encased in calls for a new imperialism and a new colonialism. Ignatieff described the Amer­ ican project as "empire lite" - "hegemony without colonies, a global sphere of influence without the burden of direct administration and the risks of daily policing" (he was writing before the war on Iraq) - but he was by no means critical of its basic mission.6 Other commentators were still more forthright in their demands for a much heavier impress of American power. Kipling's burden had passed from Great Britain to the United States, which had made itself responsible "not just for waging a war against terrorism and rogue states," so historian Niall Ferguson argued, "but also for spreading the benefits of capitalism and democracy overseas. " But the Achilles heel of American Empire was th�t "it dare not speak its name" - not, I think, a recognition of the homoerotics of empire - for "it is an empire in denial." Ferguson thought this state of affairs not only prepos­ terous - "How can you not be an empire and maintain 750 military bases in three-quarters of the countries on earth?" - but also dangerous. The United States had advertised its politico-military adventures as short-term

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GTauit)" s R.li1lbou's

and sold itself a "cut-price colonization"; a sort of McOccupation. In Ferguson's contrary view, the United States had to accept the long haul ("Why would you collaborate with an occupying power that says it is about to leave?") and also the heavy burden (by cutting what he called its "bloated domestic programs"). In short, while the global reach of the United States was immensely important it had to reconstitute itself not as a fleeting imperial power but as a durable one.7 For still other commentators, "fleeting" and "durable" were complementary not contradictory strate­ gies. America needed a new Ariel, capable of putting an instant girdle around the earth in the name of what Eliot Cohen, a key member of the Project for a New American Century, called "World War Four." The Bush administration disavowed the term, but since September 1 1 hundreds of thousands of American troops have been deployed from overseas bases in Germany, Japan, and South Korea to new posts around the globe: east Africa (and soon west Africa), central Asia, and south-east Asia. There are also plans for hundreds of floating "lily pads" or "virtual bases" for covert or "stealth" operations, like those under way in the tri-border zone between Brazil, Paraguay, and Argentina. "Everything is going to move everywhere," said one Pentagon official. "There is not going to be a place in the world where it's going to be the same as it used to, be."g What is missing from all these characterizations, apart from a moral compass, is any recognition that the power to collapse distance is also the power to expand distance. The unidirectional logic of what David Harvey calls time-space compression requires distance to contract under the spasmodic compulsions of global capitalism to reduce circulation time. This has its own uneven, inconstant geography, and it jumps and short-circuits across economic, political, military, and cultural registers. But images of "the global village" and "the shrinking world" have be­ come so powerful and pervasive that, as Cindi Katz observes, they have obscured the ways in which distance can also expand.9 This happens not only within a relative space punctuated by the differential geographies of time-space compression - Katz's (sharp) point - but also through the pro­ liferating partitions of colonial modernity. Palestinians know this every time they try to make an ordinary journey that once took them an hour and now takes a day (or more), if it can be made at all; there are no longer

Torsions like these work through two contradictory logics. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri offer a first approximation in their account of the for­ mation of the constellation of power that they call "Empire":

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any ordinary journeys in the occupied territories. As the modern by-pass

roads compress time and space for Israel's illegal settlers, so the dislocated minor roads and dirt tracks, the chokepoints and checkpoints, expand time and space for the Palestinians.

Imperialism is a machine of global striation, channelling, coding and ter­ ritorializing the flows of capital, blocking certain flows and facilitating others. The [capitalist] world market, in contrast, requires a smooth space of uncoded and deterritorialized flows.10

If global capitalism is aggressively de-territorializing, moving ever outwards in a process of ceaseless expansion and furiously tearing down barriers to capital accumulation, then colonial modernity is intrinsically territorial­ izing, forever installing partitions between "us" and "them." I describe this as a first approximation because Hardt and Negri go on to suggest that "Empire" is busily resolving this contradiction by dissolving the distinction between "outside" and "inside." "There is no more Out­ side," they write. "The modern dialectic of inside and outside has been replaced by a play of degrees and intensities, of hybridities and artificial­ ity." Similarly, Bauman believes that "September 1 1 made it clear that II n'y a pas du "dehors" [There is no outside] any more."l 1 The same argument reappears in Robert Cooper's reflections on inter­ national politics. He argues that the distinction between "inside" and "out­ side," "internal" and "external," has been dissolved within the European Union, and a Kantian bargain struck so that government is now based on "transparency, openness, interdependence and mutual vulnerability." Its postmodern states still have to come to diplomatic terms with modern states like India, Pakistan, and China, but they also have to confront a new and "pre-modern" geopolitical zone. Cooper explains that this ragged penumbra is composed of former European colonies in which the (post)colonial state has failed and from where non-state actors - includ­ ing organized crime and international terrorism - now pose a significant threat to the geopolitical order. "How should we deal with the pre­ modern chaos?" he asks. The most logical way to deal with chaos and the one most employed in the past is colonisation. But colonisation is unacceptable to postmodern states (and, as it happens, to some modern states too). It is precisely because of the death of imperialism that we are seeing the emergence of the pre-modern world. Empire and imperialism are words that have become terms of abuse

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g to there are no colonial powers willin in the postmodern world. Today, , for need the even aps perh ties, rtuni take on the job, though the oppo in the nineteenth century. . . . All the colonisation is as great as it ever was . . . . The weak still need the strong and conditions for imperialism are there d. A world in which the efficient and the strong still need an orderly worl ty. . . . What is needed then is a new well-governed export stability and liber o­ to a world of human rights and cosm kind of imperialism, one acceptable h, whic m rialis impe an ne: outli its rn politan values. We can already disce h rests whic but ion nisat orga and r orde like all imperialisms, aims to bring today on the voluntary principle.

untary imperialism" (a phrase Cooper identifies this principle with the "vol ce" ) of the multilateral mech­ that is right up there with "military intelligen International Monetary Fund anisms of the global economy - including the d "the imperialism of neigh­ and the World Bank - and with what he calle the international commun­ bours." "It is not just soldiers that come from n officers, central bankers and ity," he explains, " it is police, judges, priso neighbors are like, but if they others." I have no idea what Cooper's own their own "voluntary" dis­ are forever interfering in his life and imposing ed. But then perhaps, like ciplines, then I'm surprised he has not mov metaphorical world he inhab­ so many others in the mundane rather than claims that ours is a post­ its, he is unable to do so. In a later essay he now gone" and with them imperial world in which "all the empires are s." But he adds, this is also "the wish to conquer and to rule in other land ns between the external and a "borderless world" in which the distinctio e-scale crime may come "larg internal dissolve at critical junctures, where e explosively together com to resemble small-scale war," and where the twO

in terrorism. 12 y more skeptical about Palestinian writer Elias Sanbar is understandabl a radically different ring. this post-imperial world, and his argument has hesitates over the place of Yet he reaches a similar conclusion. Cooper - the rupture between the United States in his geographical imaginary makes his reluctance all America and "old Europe" over the war in Iraq s about saying that "global­ the more revealing - but Sanbar makes no bone where into a domestic ization is in the process of transforming every that: s claim American spac e." In cons eque nce, he [T]he notions of interior and exterior, of domestic and foreign policy, will be called upon to disappear in favour of Washington's supremacy, which is gradually becoming the enthroned capital of the world . . . . It is not a

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question of a new occupation of foreign territories but of an integration . - a� annexation, I should say - of all humanity within the borders of the UnIted States.13

!his is the ideology of American Empire, to be sure, of the New Amer­ Ican Century in which America is cast not only as the global superpower �ut also.as t�e universal (Hollywood) actor. But unless one understands humamty " In Sanbar's last sentence in the always conditional sense prod�ced by the excision - the ex-ception - of homo sacer, it is not the pra�ttce of American Empire. For over 200 years, as Veena Das cogently remInded us, "the distinction between an 'inside' in which values of democracy and freedom were propagated and an 'outside' which was not ready for such values and hence had to be subjugated by violence in order �o be reformed has marked the rhetoric and practice of colonialism and Its deep connections with Western democracies. "14 Das had good reason . . �o say thIS In the aftermath of September 1 1 , and the subsequent unfold­ Ing of. "the war on terror" in Afghanistan and its violent extensions into Pales.tIne a�d Iraq (�nd bey�nd) have demonstrated not the slackening but the tIghtenIng of thIS colomal spacing. For colonialism's promise of modernity has always been deferred - always . . by. the boundary between "us" and "them" - and aIthough that skewed partItIOn . IS rou�inely crossed, even transgressed, the dismal fact is that �o �olomal a.nxlety, no.c?lonial guilt has ever erased it altogether. If this I� still the pnmary �endlan of imaginative geography, however, it is no Simple geometry. It IS, as I have repeatedly insisted, a topology that also marks the threshold, the space of the exception, whose seams are folded stretched, and. torn into new, ever more wrenching constellations. Border: are not. only. hnes on maps but spacings dispersed across multiple sites emba�sles, alrpor:s, detention centers - that radically contort conventional mappIngs of te�ntory. Even hybrid "borderlands" bear the scar tissue of those bo�ndanes. Through these twists and turns the divide may be an�ul�e� I� some registers (in these ways, you may be modern: like "us") whIle It IS Simultaneously reaffirmed in others (in these ways you will never be modern: always irredeemably "other"). Our '�six degrees of separation" mean that the modern world is marked by. spacmgs of connection, which are worked by transnational capital cir1 CUlts and com�odity .chains, by global flows of information and images, and by geopohtlcal alIgnments and military dispositions. These have their own uneven geographies - they do not produce a single, smooth surface

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- and they are made intelligible through their own imaginative geo­ graphies. But the modern world is also marked by spacings of disjuncture between the same and the other that are installed through the same or parallel economic, cultural, and political networks but articulated by countervailing imaginative geographies that give them different force and sanction. Imaginative geographies are thus doubled spaces of articulation. Their inconstant topologies are mappings of connective dissonance in which connections are elaborated in some registers even as they are disavowed in others. These are all "gravity's rainbows." In his novel of (almost) that name, Thomas Pynchon described the arc of the V-2 rockets launched against Britain from occupied Europe in the dying days of the Second World War as a "screaming coming across the sky. " Several writers have used the same image to describe the events of September 1 1 . Hijacked aircraft crashing into the Twin Towers, cruise missiles and "daisy-cutters" raining down on Afghanistan: so many "screamings across the sky" whose terrifying arcs at once marked and made viscerally physical connections. IS But they also made disconnections, marked by an unwillingness to see an altogether more solid geometry and to hear an altogether different sound: the misshapen bodies of the dead and the screamings of the injured as they lay among the rubble. Imaginative geographies are like gravity's rainbows. They map the twists and turns of engagement and estrangement.

contract the space of American tourism as flights were cancelled and aircraft flew half-empty. Two weeks later Bush told enthusiastic airline employees at Chicago's O'Hare airport that "one of the great goals of this war is to tell the traveling public: Get on board." 17 This must count as one of the most bizarre reasons for waging war in human history, and yet it also speaks a powerful truth. Modern metropolitan cultures privilege their own mobility. "Privilege" has to be understood literally; there are other cultures of travel within which movement is a burden, an imposition, even a tragedy.ls What, then, of Bauman's vagabonds? Three weeks after September 1 1 the metropolis reasserted its customary powers and privileges as military action was launched against Afghanistan, and thousands of refugees were displaced by these time-space compressions. Many of them were trapped at borders - not only at Afghanistan's borders but at other borders around the world. Here is Gary Younge on their experience almost in Britain:

The Colonial Present and Cultures of Travel

Thousands of displaced people, refugees, and asylum-seekers found that, in the very eye of these wrenching time-space compressions, time and space had dramatically expanded for them. Then in April 2003 the British government began the forcible repatriation of Afghan refugees. Accord­ ing to the Home Office, "the deportation was aimed partly at testing the situation in Afghanistan." The refugees were the creatures of a cruel experiment: "We need to ensure that the process is sustainable and that there is adequate infrastructure and security on the ground to receive them." There are, of course, other - less violent - ways of investigating conditions on the ground than sending desperate human beings back to the danger zone. In fact, there is credible, compelling evidence that Afghanistan is not safe, and the British government continues to advise its own citizens against travelling there.20 But refugees are allowed few rights. "The globe shrinks for those who own it," Homi Bhabha once remarked, but "for the displaced or the dispossessed, the migrant or refugee, no distance is

Mappings of engagement and estrangement articulate contemporary cul­ tures of travel. Bauman's tourists probably know this without being told; at least those accustomed to move from one exotic site/sight to another, gazing upon the other but always able to withdraw to the security of the familiar, know this. As the young British protagonist in Will Rhode's Paperback Raita puts it, "Half the attraction of coming to India is the ability to leave it." Tourists move in the folds between compression and expansion, and cultures of travel are some of the most commonplace means through which colonialism is abroad in our own present. If, as Drry once remarked, it is now the case that in the first world "people are much of the time tourists, whether they like it or not," it is also the case that they - we - are implicated in the performance of the colonial present.16 Ironically one of the immediate consequences of September 11 was to

[S]hould those whom we seek to protect [by our international military actions] arrive on our shores, all apparent concern evaporates in a haze of xenophobic bellicosity. Whatever compassion may have been expressed previously is confiscated at the border. As soon as they touch foot on British soil they go from being a cause to be championed to a problem to be dealt with. We may flout international law abroad, but God forbid any one should breach immigration law here . . . . We love them so we bomb them; we loathe them so we deport them.19

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more awesome than the few feet across borders or frontiers. ,, 2 1 The figure of the refugee - as both wanderer and prisoner - throws into crisis what Agamben calls "the originary fiction of sovereignty" because it calls into question the connective imperative that makes nativity the ,foundation of nationality and hence of the sovereign space of the nation-state. The re­ fugee is, figuratively and physically, a border figure who, if not excluded or confined, threatens to perforate the territorial integrity of the state.22 It should, then, come as no surprise to find close parallels between the extra-territoriality of Camp X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay, where the United States detains hundreds of "unlawful combatants" captured during its mil­ itary operations in Afghanistan, and Woomera Detention Centre in the Australian outback, where hundreds of asylum-seekers were detained in "a place that is, and yet is not, Australia." "Razor wire and metal fenc­ ing mark out the camp as a space of exception," Suvendri Perera writes. "Five layers of wire protect the threshold between Australia and its other, not-Australia." Australia's Pacific Solution works to the same end: asylum­ seekers who are intercepted by Australian forces are transferred to camps on the tiny island nation of Nauru, on Manus Island in Papua New Guinea, or on Australia's Christmas Island.23 Or again, in early 2003 the British government drew up plans to deport asylum-seekers to "Regional Pro­ cessing Areas" in the zone of origin or to "Transit Processing Centres" on the borders of the European Union, institutionalizing yet another space of the exception.24 We need to remind ourselves that camps like these have their origins in the European colonial wars of the late nineteenth cen­ tury. In such conditions, now as then, the "external" and the "internal" are articulated not to erase the "outside" but to produce it as the serial spacing of the exception, for ever inscribing exclusion through inclusion.

Less than a year later the American director of Human Rights Watch reported that "the US government has failed to uphold the very values that President Bush declared were under attack on September 1 1." The Bush administration attempted to curtail democratic freedoms in at least three arenas: by circumventing federal and international law; by suppressing public information; and by discriminating against visible minorities. Even the conservative Cato Institute objected to the proliferation of "secretive subpoenas, secretive arrests, secretive trials, and secretive deportations. ,,27 Much of this was authorized by the USA PATRIOT Act - "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism" - which was passed less than two months after September 1 1 to allow law enforcement and intelligence agencies unprecedented powers of surveillance and investigation.28 This series of exceptions was perfectly consistent with the imaginative geographies of civilization and barbarism that were mobilized by the White House to wage its war on terror. Paul Passavant and Jodi Dean describe "a constant and mutual production of the civilized and the sav­ age throughout the social circuitry. " The homeland had to be defended not only against the enemy without but also against the enemy within.29 On September 1 1 , 2002, for example, the US Immigration and Natur­ alization Service introduced a new registration system for designated "non-immigrant aliens." Visitors from specified countries were not only to be interviewed but also photographed and fingerprinted at the port of entry, and later required to report to an INS office to provide additional documentation and information. Compliance with this National Security Entry and Exit Registration System was made retroactive for all visitors 1 6 years of age and older already resident in the United States who came from Afghanistan, Algeria, Bahrain, Bangladesh, Egypt, Eritrea, Indonesia, Iraq, Jordan, Kuwait, Lebanon, Libya, Morocco, North Korea, Oman, Pakistan, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Syria, Sudan, Tunisia, the United Arab Emirates, and Yemen. The only country on the call-in list with no substantial Muslim population is North Korea.3o This is a strategy familiar from the Cold War, whose geography of containment was double-headed:

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Pandora 's Spaces As these zones of indistinction multiply around the world, so it becomes clear that "third spaces" or "paradoxical spaces" are not always and every­ where the emancipatory formations that some writers have taken them to be.2s Before September 1 1 Agamben had warned that "the camp is the space that opens up when the state of the exception starts to become the rule." After September 1 1 he worried that the "war on terror" would be invoked so routinely that the exception would indeed become the rule, that the law would be forever suspending itself.26 His fears were well founded.

259

The first conception speaks to a threat outside of the social body, a threat that therefore has to be excluded, or isolated in quarantine, and kept at bay from the domestic body. The second meaning of containment, which speaks to the domestic contents of the social body, concerns a threat internal to

261

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Gravity's Rainbows

the host which must then be neutralized by being fully �bsorbed and thereby neutralized.3l

Maschio - hardly the hero of the story - to drive home the cause of self­ determination for Venice and the need to preserve and purify its Venetian culture. At the end of the novel Del Maschio rounds on Dibdin's detec­ tive, Aurelio Zen, and tells him:

260

Although the Bush administration abandoned containment for pre­ emption, its national security strategy was also given an interior as well as an exterior focus: "Profiling and pre-emption work together to define the human targets of the 'war on terror.' ,,32 This is more than the reha­ bilitation of the Cold War and its paranoid silencing of difference and dis­ sent, however, because the permanent state of emergency institutionalized through these imaginative geographies of the alien "other" also reactivates the dispositions of a colonial imaginary. Its spacings are mirror images of the "wild zones" of the colonial imagination. "The national security state," Susan Buck-Morss points out, "is called into existence with the sovereign pronouncement of a 'state of emergency' and generates a wild zone of power, barbaric and violent, operating without democratic over­ sight, in order to combat an 'enemy' that threatens the existence not merely and not mainly of its citizens, but of its sovereignty. ,, 33 The process of surveillance and screening, profiling and purification, has not been confined to the United States. When Kanishka Jasuriya warned against the creeping internationalization of the state of exception already in train before September 1 1 - he drew special attention to the application of strategies of risk management and profiling to "target populations" around the world.34 Throughout the non-Islamic world Arabs and Muslims have been made desperately vulnerable by these identifications. In Israel their status has been made ever more precarious as one-fifth of Israel's own population has increasingly been excluded from politically qualified life; Israeli Arabs have been demonized not only as a fifth column but as a "cancerous growth," and in the occupied territories - for which Israel takes no civil responsibility - Sharon's chief of staff has chillingly promised the Palestinians "chemotherapy" as his armed forces set about excluding them from bare life toO.35 Immigrants, refugees, and asylum-seekers have been the victims of paranoia and hysteria in Europe too. At the beginning of The Clash of Civilizations Samuel Huntington cites a passage from novelist Michael Dibdin's Dead Lagoon that speaks directly to these issues: "There can be no true friends without true enemies. Unless we hate what we are not, we cannot love what we are." Huntington described this as "an unfortunate truth," as though it were somehow inscribed in the nature of things. But in the novel these sentences come from a speech given by Ferdinando Del

Sooner or later you're going to have to choose. . . . The new Europe will be no place for rootless drifters and cosmopolitans with no sense of belong­ ing. It will be full of frontiers, both physical and ideological, and they will be rigorously patrolled. You will have to be able to produce your papers or suffer the consequences.36

Dibdin is clearly saying that this is a choice and not, as Huntington seems to think, an irrefutable given, so that the construction of an archipelago of inclusion and exclusion cannot be attributed solely to the threat posed by external or internal "others." In constructing multiple others as "other," and in assenting to these constructions and impositions, we not only do this to others: we do it to ourselves. We all become the subjects and the objects of the "securitization" of civil society. This is as ugly as it sounds - it means taking the "civil" out of "society" - and as its par­ titions proliferate internally and externally, inscribed through and legit­ imized by the so-called "war on terror," so colonialism is surreptitiously repatriated and rehabilitated and the camp is confirmed as the nomos of a continuing colonial modernity.37 The choice that is offered, as Henry Giroux and Paul Street have argued, is the false choice between being safe and being free: "War is individualized as every citizen becomes a poten­ tial terrorist who has to prove that he or she is not a menace to society. Under the rubric of the new permanent war against the never-ending specter of terrorist apocalypse, which feeds off government-induced media panics, war provides the moral imperative to collapse the boundaries between innocent and guilty, between suspect and non-suspect, between peaceful political dissent and pathological, extremist alienation."38 We are all - actually or potentially - homines sacri. In his essay on the concept of history, Walter Benjamin wrote that "the tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of emergency' in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keeping with this insight.,,39 Benjamin was writing in 1 940, but his commentary on the rise of fascism has a resonance in our own times that is as deep as it is disturbing. His call for a critical reflec­ tion on the concept of history is immensely important, but we also need

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a conception of geography that is in keeping with this same insight. If we can understand the multiple ways in which difference is folded into dis­ tance, and the complex figurations through which time and space are threaded into these tense constellations, we might perhaps see that what Ignatieff once called "distant strangers" are not so distant after all - and not so strange either.40 For this possibility to be realized - for us to cease turning on the treadmill of the colonial present - it will be necessary to explore other spatializations and other topologies, and to turn our imag­ inative geographies into geographical imaginations that can enlarge and enhance our sense of the world and enable us to situate ourselves within it with care, concern, and humility.41 This is not a call for an empty rel­ ativism; there will still be disagreements, conflicts, and even enemies. But in order to conduct ourselves properly, decently, we need to set ourselves against the unbridled arrogance that assumes that "We" have the mono­ poly of Truth and that the world is necessarily ordered by - and around - Us. If we can do this, then we might see that the most enduring mem­ orial to the thousands who were murdered in the catastrophic destruction of the World Trade Center and parts of the Pentagon on September 1 1 and to the thousands more who have been killed in Afghanistan, Israel, Palestine, and Iraq - would be the destruction of the architectures of enmity that produced and have been sustained by those dreadful events.

Notes

i

Chapter 1 : The Colonial Present 1

2

3

4

Jorge Luis Borges, "John Wilkins' analytical language," in his Selected Non­ Fictions (New York: Viking, 1999), pp. 229-32: 231. The essay was first published in Spanish in 1942. Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (London: Tavistock, 1970), p. XV; 1st pub. in French as Les Mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966). Foucault, Order of Things, p. xix; emphasis added. I have taken "tableau of queerness" from Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1995; 1st pub. 1978), p. 103. It should be said that Foucault's later writings and lectures were by no means indifferent to colonial power. For example: At the end of the sixteenth century we have, if not the first, at least an early example of political structures of the West. It should never be forgotten that while colonization, with its techniques of political and juridical weapons, obviously transported European models to other con­ tinents, it also had a considerable boomerang effect on the mechanisms of power in the West, and on the apparatuses, institutions and tech­ niques of power. A whole series of colonial models was brought back to the West, and the result was that the West could practice something resembling colonization . . . on itself.

Il

Michael Foucault, "Society Must Be Defended": Lectures at the College de France 1 9 75-1976 (New York: Picador, 2003), p. 103. But Foucault

never developed these ideas in any systematic fashion, a point that Said has

264

Notes to pages 3-4

consistently sharpened: see Derek Gregory, "Imaginative geographies," Progress in Human Geography 19 ( 1 995), pp. 447-85. 5 For another example, see Roland Barthes's brief account of his visit to Japan in Empire of the Signs (New York: Hill & Wang, 1982; 1st pub. in French, 1970); but see Joanne Sharp, "Writing traveVtraveling writing: Roland O Barthes detours the Orient," Environment and Planning D : Society & Space 20 (2002), pp. 155-66. 6 Zhang Longxi, Mighty Opposites: From Dichotomies to Differences in the Comparative Study of China (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998), pp. 21-2. Foucault does of course concede that his description of China as a "privileged site of space" belongs to "our dreamworld"; but he does not pursue those spectral footprints. In Borges's original essay, in contrast, the "Chinese encyclopaedia" was not summoned up to represent a system of thought alien to European culture, since its (imaginary) "absurdities" were used to parallel the (real) "ambiguities, redundancies and deficiencies" in the attempt made by the English cleric John Wilkins to develop a universal lan­ guage in his Essay Towards a Real Character and a Philosophy of Language (1688). I have placed "Latin America" in scare-quotes to draw attention to its colonial implications. The term was originally proposed in the 1 850s and carries within it the traces of French, Portuguese, and Spanish occupations: indigenous cultures and languages were, of course, not derived from Latin. Borges is perfectly well aware of this; for a discussion of the hybrid spaces between magical realism and the critique of colonialism, and of the vexed politics to which they give rise, see Stephen Siemon, "Magic realism as post­ colonial discourse," Canadian Literature 1 1 6 ( 1998), pp. 9-24. 7 The concept of transculturation was developed by the Cuban ethnographer Fernando Ortiz, who juxtaposed the term to "acculturation." Whereas acculturation implies the adjustment of a subordinate culture to the im­ positions and exactions of a dominant culture, transculturation implies a ' dynamic relation of combination and contradiction. For a critical discussion of the genealogy of the concept, see John Beverley, Subalternity and Repre­ sentation: Arguments in Cultural Theory (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1999), pp. 43-7, and for its deployment see Mary Louise Pratt, Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation (London: Routledge, 1992). 8 Said, Orientalism; Fernando Coronil, "Beyond Occidentalism: toward non­ imperial geohistorical categories," Cultural Anthropology 1 1 (1996), pp. 51-87. Said thought it unlikely that anyone would imagine "a field symmetrical to [Orientalism] called Occidentalism" because the imaginative geographies pro­ duced by other cultures are not bound in to a system of power-knowledge comparable to the tensile strength and span of European and American colonialism and imperialism. In his view (and mine) it would be wrong to

Notes to pages

5-9

265

suppose that reversing the terms equalizes them, and it is this fundamental asymmetry that Coronil seeks to redeem through his (contrary) reading of

9

10

11 12 13

14 15

16 17 18

"Occidentalism. " Niall Ferguson, Empire: How Britain Made the Modem World (London: Allen Lane, Penguin Press, 2003), p. xxi. Recognizing other' sensibilities, the American edition has a different subtitle: Empire: The Rise and Demise of the British World Order and the Lessons for Global Power (New York: Basic Books, 2003). Enrique Dussel, "Eurocentrism and modernity," Boundary 2 20/3 ( 1993), pp. 65-76; see also his The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of "the Other" and the Myth of Modernity (New York: Continuum, 1995). Joseph Conrad, "Geography and some explorers," in his Last Essays, ed. Richard Curle (London: Dent, 1926), pp. 1-3 1 . Felix Driver, Geography Militant: Cultures of Exploration and Empire (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001), pp. 200-1, 216. Nicholas Thomas, Colonialism's Culture: Anthropology, Travel and Gov­ ernment (Cambridge: Polity, 1994), p. 10. Thomas is signaling another departure from Foucault, whose genealogies of the modern worked to defamiliarize the taken-for-grantedness of the present by accentuating its specificity and contingency - how different it is from the past - whereas the subversive power of postcolonial critique derives from its power to trace con­ tinuities and parallels: how similar the present is to the past. Both strategies are of critical importance. If, as I will claim in a moment, we need to recover the coexistence and collision of multiple temporalities, then Foucault's "his­ tory of the present" is indispensable for its disruption of the unilinear and progressive trajectory of continuist histories. But postcolonialism's critique is invaluable for its disruption of the no less unilinear and progressive tra­ jectory of episodic histories that dispatch the past to the archive rather than the repertoire. Akhil Gupta, Postcolonial Development: Agriculture in the Making of Modem India (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), p. 17. Andreas Huyssen, "Present pasts: media, politics, amnesia," in Arjun Appadurai (ed.), Globalization (Durham NC: Duke University Press, 2001), pp. 57-77; see also his Twilight Memories: Marking Time in a Culture of Amnesia (London and New York: Routledge, 1995). Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), p. 57. Thomas, Colonialism's Culture, p. 2. Robert Young, Postcolonialism: An Historical Introduction (Oxford: Blackwell, 2001); see also his Postcolonialism: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003). Young's emphasis on the three con­ tinents is in marked contrast to most other accounts of postcolonialism that

266

19 20 21 22 23

Notes to pages

Notes to pages 9-1 2

focus instead on the foundational significance of three academic figures: Edward Said, Homi Bhabha, and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. This is not to disparage their work - which would be absurd - but to recover the political­ economic filiations of postcolonialism. See Bart Moore-Gilbert, Postcolonial Theory: Contexts, Practices, Politics (London: Verso, 1997). Ali Behdad, Belated Travelers: Orientalism in the Age of Colonial Dissolu­ tion (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1 996), pp. 6-8. Terry Eagleton, Crazy John and the Bishop and Other Essays (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1999). Wlad Godzich, On the Emergence of Prose (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1978), p. 162. Seumas Milne, "An imperial nightmare," Guardian, November 8, 2001; Maria Misra, "Heart of smugness," Guardian, July 23, 2002. Renato Rosaldo, "Imperialist nostalgia," in his Culture and Truth (London: Routledge, 1993), pp. 68-87; Paul Smith, "Visiting the Banana Republic," in Andrew Ross (ed.), Universal Abandon? The Politics of Postmodernism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1992), pp. 128-48; Derek Gregory, "Colonial nostalgia and cultures of travel: spaces of constructed visibility in Egypt," in Nezar AISayyad (ed.), Consuming Tradition, Manu­

(London: Allen Lane, The Penguin Press, 2001 ). 25 Pierre Nora, "Between memory and history: les lieux de memoire," Repre­ sentations 26 ( 1989), pp. 7-25; id., "From lieux de memoire to realms of memory," in Pierre Nora and Lawrence Kritzman (eds), Realms of Memory: Rethinking the French Past, vol. 1 : Conflicts and Divisions (New York: Columbia University Press), pp. xv-xxiv; Jean Starobinski, 'The idea of nostalgia,' Diogenes 54 ( 1 966), pp. 81-103; Huyssen, "Present pasts," p. 65. 26 Said, Culture and Imperialism, p. 5 1 . 2 7 Fredric Jameson, "The end o f temporality," Critical Inquiry 2 9 (2003), pp. 695-718: 700-1. This from the man who famously could not find his way around the Bonaventure Hotel in Los Angeles! See my Geographical Imaginations (Oxford: Blackwell, 1994), pp. 152-7, 278 - 8 1 . 2 8 Donna Haraway, "Situated knowledges: the science question i n feminism and the privilege of partial perspective," in Simians, Cyborgs and Women: The Reinvention of Nature (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 183-201; John Rajchman, "Foucault's art of seeing," in his Philosophical .Events: Essays of the 80s (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991), pp. 68-102. 29 Giles Foden, Zanzibar (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), pp. 335-6.

267

Chapter 2: Architectures of Enmity 1

2

3 4 5 6

facturing Heritage: Global Norms and Urban Forms in the Age of Tourism

(New York: Routledge, 2001 ), pp. 1 1 1-51; Graham Huggan, Postcolonial Exotic: Marketing the Margins (London: Routledge, 2001). 24 David Cannadine, Ornamentalism: How the British saw their Empire

1 7-20

7

8

9

10 11

Edward Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1978), p. 54; see also Derek Gregory, "Imaginative geographies," Progress in Human Geography 19 ( 1 995), pp. 447-85. Giles Foden, Zanzibar (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), p. 241. Foden's novel is of direct interest to my argument, and not only because it centers on the bombing of the US embassies in Nairobi and Dar es Salaam in 1998 (as I noted in ch. 1 ); it is also relevant because it troubles the divide between "fact" and "fiction." James Clifford, The Predicament of Culture: Twentieth-Century Ethnography, Literature and Art (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1988), p. 6. Said, Orientalism, pp. 63, 71. Nidhal, cited in Nuha al-Radi, Baghdad Diaries: A Woman's Chronicle of War and Exile (New York: Vintage, 2003), p. 151. Alexander Moore, "Postcolonial 'textual space': towards an approach," SOAS Literary Review 3 (2001), pp. 1-23; Edward Soja, Postmodern Geo­ graphies: The Reassertion of Space in Critical Social Theory (London: Verso, 1989), p. 7. Soja was trading on Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991). For space as performance, see Gillian Rose, "Performing space," in Doreen Massey, John Allen, and Phillip Sarre (eds), Human Geography Today (Cambridge: Polity, 1999), pp. 247-59. Judith Butler, Bodies that Matter (London and New York: Routledge, 1993), p. 241; cf. Homi Bhabha, The Location of Culture (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 219. Ken Booth and Tim Dunne, "Worlds in collision," in Booth and Dunne (eds), Worlds in Collision: Terror and the Future of Global Order (London: Palgrave, 2002), pp. 1-23: 1. On "overlapping territories, intertwined histories," see Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Alfred Knopf, 1993), pp. 1-61. The reference to a horizon of danger derives from Walter Benjamin's sixth thesis on the concept of history. "To articulate the past historically," he wrote, "means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger." Michael J. Shapiro, Violent Cartographies: Mapping Cultures of War (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), p. xi. James der Derian, "The war of networks," Theory and Event 5/4 (2002), at